Movies

I’ve always been hesitant to describe myself as a collector, but the truth is that I’ve been collecting things my whole life. From stuffed animals and sticks when I was little (yes, sticks) to books to comics to toys, there hasn’t been a time in my life that I wasn’t out chasing something to add to a “collection”. And even though in my mind I always saw myself first becoming a collector while in college, as I get older I realize that the period of time from when I put away all my toys as a young adult to the time in college when I rediscovered them again feels less like a defining moment in my life and more like a rare anomaly. And more importantly, do I want to continue to be defined as an adult with a “toy room” in his house?1That was a rhetorical question. I didn’t like being known for that once I turned 30! My office at work…that’s another story. And what does collecting mean to my life, after all?2Emphasis on MY life. This should go without saying, but this whole essay relates to me, personally, alone. I’m not throwing shade on anyone else and their collecting habits. Do what makes you happy!

To answer that, let’s back up. Waaaaay back. Back to the late 1970s, and the chain of events that would ultimately end with my collecting habits set in stone. Back then, I was a pretty normal kid like any other; playing soccer on the weekends, hanging out with friends, riding my bike and exploring ponds and drainpipes after school. I played with random toys and picked up random comics at the local drugstore.3Did anyone call them “convenience stores” back then? I don’t remember 7-Elevens until later; for candy and comics, it was always Rexall Drugs or Walgreens. I didn’t really “collect” anything, just had the usual toys that you get as gifts from parents and relatives. My life was a pretty typical life for a kid in the 1970s. Until 1977, that is, when I had a life-changing event that was also typical for a (mostly male) kid of my generation: I saw Star Wars for the first time. And, like so many others, it changed me.

I can remember this like it was yesterday. It was late Summer, 1977. My family had just moved to a tiny Air Force base in Montgomery, Alabama the previous month, and I felt kind of lost, having left the home and friends in San Antonio that I had known my entire brief life up to that point. Wanting to be a cartoonist when I grew up, I was obsessed with Disney.4Seriously, it was a good time to like Disney, even though it was dark days for the studio. That week alone, three Disney features were playing at the local theaters! The Rescuers was about to be released, and I was looking forward to seeing it like crazy; we didn’t go to the movies as a family that frequently when I was growing up, but my parents did drop my friends and me off at the matinees quite often.5In those days before home video, matinees played cartoons before the movies, and there was a steady stream of revival films that made the rounds. You might see something relatively new, or you might see an old James Bond or Disney live-action film. If I were lucky, a new movie would cycle quickly to the base theater where I could just bike to it. And the new movie that I really wanted to see was The Rescuers, as it would be the first new Disney animated film that I could see on the big screen when it was released. I had already started hanging out with the kid next door, Dean, who, luckily for me, was my age and even shared a wall with me in our duplex. So when he invited me to the movies one day with his family to see The Rescuers, I was very excited! We all piled in their van and drove off the base to the local theater. Except…we didn’t go to the local theater. We kept driving much farther. 6Montgomery is a relatively small city, and looking it up now, the theater was only 7 miles away, but for a little kid that never left the base, it seemed pretty far away from home. I trusted that Dean’s parents knew what they were doing, until his father asked me if I was excited that we were finally going to see that new blockbuster everyone was talking about: Star Wars.

This is the actual movie listing for the weekend I saw it. Click to enlarge.

I wasn’t. I wasn’t excited AT ALL. I wanted to see my cartoon! You see, back then I hated Sci-Fi (most likely the result of catching 2001 on tv a few years earlier. My 5-year-old self was not impressed)! So I just sulked and pouted quietly until we got there. And waited in line to see something I was barely even aware of; I’m pretty sure at that point in my sheltered life the only thing I knew was the title and nothing else. We finally got inside and took our seats. AND MY LITTLE MIND WAS BLOWN. I remember it so vividly, even today. I was always fidgety during movies but not this one. With this one I was transfixed. When Dean’s dad took the rest of the kids to the restroom during the attack on the Death Star7Seriously, what the hell is wrong with people?!? I waved him away. I don’t remember much about the year we spent in Alabama before moving back home. But I do remember seeing that movie. I think it’s tough for people who weren’t there at the right age to comprehend just what it was like to experience this thing; It was unlike anything else ever. 8Obviously, things didn’t stay that way. But it was like a dog-whistle that only young boys could hear. Much like the Twilight phenomenon that hit young girls the same way a decade ago. I walked into that movie wanting to be a cartoonist; I walked out needing to be a filmmaker. 9Fun story: I only thought I was destined to be a director until a real director, James Cameron, inadvertently talked me out of it when I was 23. Which is a longer story for another time.

So you could say that I liked Star Wars. And it was just the first step in a long journey. I still wasn’t a collector, yet. Most people know that there were no Star Wars toys to buy that year, but in a nutshell, Kenner started too late to have toys out for Christmas 1977 and instead sold an empty box with a coupon to be redeemed later for four action figures. I was blissfully unaware of this. In fact, I don’t think I expected there to be any Star Wars toys at all. 10I had some GI Joe figures and vehicles around this time, but my memories don’t include them. When I think about playing in those days I think about riding my bike and playing with frogs in the creeks. One night I was surprised by my Dad bringing home a knock-off lightsaber toy that was more or less a flashlight with a golf club protector on it that he picked up on his way home from work. I had a blast with it until it broke. But it wasn’t until right before we moved that I saw my first Star Wars toys; Dean caught me in front of our houses one day to show me that his grandmother had sent him a Luke Skywalker figure and his Landspeeder vehicle. We played with them for a bit right there, in the back of his family station wagon. I was blown away that I might be able to actually recreate scenes from the movie as I played. 11I can’t recall EVER seeing a movie more than once in the theater until I got my driver’s license, and Star Wars was no exception. For whatever reason, it just wasn’t something my family did. I did end up seeing it one more time before home video when I took my parents to see it at a drive-in during its 1979 re-release, which is also when I realized I needed glasses as it was very blurry to watch. This was around June 1978, nearly a full year since I saw Star Wars in the theater. And yet still…I didn’t get any Star Wars toys.

Dad at the Toy Box, circa mid-1950s, with an inset of a newspaper ad showing the logo as it was in the 1970s

By the end of Summer, we had moved back to San Antonio, and I went back to my old school12Total nightmare. No one “moves on” like fickle fourth graders. Some new kids supplanted me while I was gone, giving me plenty of time for toys by myself, angrily contemplating the lonely universe. But I’m not holding a grudge or anything. and picking up my old habits. I still talked about Star Wars all the time, indoctrinating my old friends at school and wearing down my family. I pretty much only got toys for birthdays and Christmas, with the occasional bribe for being good during hospital visits, etc. so it was the biggest surprise when I came home from school one day that Fall to find six of the first twelve Kenner Star Wars figures waiting for me on my bed! I don’t remember which ones they were now but otherwise, the memory is crystal clear in my mind. My mom had picked up all the ones she could find at the local AFB BX13Air Force Base Base Exchange, for non-military brats. Basically the on-base version of a small Walmart. Shortly after that, we found the other six figures and I had them all. Side note: when I got older I threw away all my childhood toys, but for some reason, I kept all the cardbacks these figures were packaged on. I still have those original twelve on the wall in my toy room
…minus some mail-away proof-of-purchases. Thanks, Mom! And that’s how it went for the next five years; I would get Star Wars toys only from then on; no more GI Joes, no Disney characters. And while I do still remember some of the exact moments where I bought a specific toy14The big ones that pop up: the day my Grandmother died in surgery in 1979 my Dad took me away from the hospital where everyone was waiting and uncharacteristically bought me two Star Wars playsets: Creature Cantina and Land of the Jawas. I remember being at her funeral and my cousin showing me the Empire Strikes Back Snowtrooper that he found that morning as we were getting into the cars to leave. I remember my dog eating my Greedo figure, and biking to Winn’s in a panic to find a replacement. And I remember finding my own first ESB figure, Han Solo in Hoth outfit, in Windsor Park Mall and begging my sister to buy it for me., what I mostly remember is the feeling of being in those stores, or traveling to those stores, and the events that precipitated each purchase. Now, I know that most kids of the era will first think of Toys R Us when they reminisce about toys and their childhoods, but for me, Toys R Us meant video games. The stores I associate with Star Wars and other toys of the 1970s/and early 1980s are ones like Winn's Variety Store
or TG&Y or the amazing Lionel Playworld, not to mention all the department stores that still had toy departments like Joske’s or Sears (home of the wonderful yearly Wishbook!) And above them all was our local mall toy chain, The Toy Box, operated by the Alwais family. As far back as I can remember, my Dad had been taking me to the Toy Box, where he would have nice conversations with the owners if they were around. I thought he was just very friendly15He was that, too. Dad would talk to anyone who seemed like they had a second to listen. but it was mainly because he himself had worked at the Toy Box in the 1950s as a teen. And so there was always a good excuse to visit the store and maybe come away with at least a new Han Solo or droid figure. In fact, I would get Star Wars ANYTHING
. But toys weren’t the only collecting gateway that Star Wars opened for me – comics beckoned, thanks once again to Mom.

Now, like any kid of the 1970s, I grew up reading comic books. They were on every newsstand, in every grocery and drugstore, and in every mom & pop store on a nice spinner rack. Comics were made to be read and thrown away; like most of the things you acquire as a child they were designed to be disposable. I wanted to be a cartoonist very badly, so newspaper comic strips and “funny books” are all I had the time for. These were very much kids comics, as best I can recall. Definitely no superhero stuff. Anyway, the comics most kids read back then are ones that today are sadly scarce: Harvey Comics
(Richie Rich, Casper, Hot Stuff, etc.), Disney Comics
(Donald Duck, Super Goof, Uncle Scrooge), and those little MAD compilation paperbacks
.16I seriously loved all the kind of disposable entertainment the newsstands used to offer. Weirdly, I can remember one specific line from a Jackie Joker’s comic (“It’s not Sci-Fi, It’s SCI-FUN!”) but pretty much nothing else from any of those stories. Superheroes really didn’t register on 7-year-old me, nor did any kind of fantasy characters. Until I saw (or course) a Star Wars comic on the newsstand
at the Mall in 1978; I was flabbergasted that there could be ALL-NEW stories about my new favorite movie! 17Yes, I was a pretty naive kid. The internet cured that. No matter, I was buying these things every time I saw them at the grocery store…for about a year. Still not collecting, though. At best I had a handful of random comics, often not even completing the story arcs that ran through multiple issues. As I naturally aged out of such things I stopped reading comics altogether, probably around the time I turned eight years old and we moved back to Texas. I was already a voracious reader of books by then and funny comics couldn’t compete with The Lord Of The Rings. And to be honest, I all but forgot about them. Until Christmas 1980, that is.

Christmas that year was like most any other: I got some shirts, a couple of Star Wars toys, and probably a book or record. But in my stocking Mom had put something that she probably found as an afterthought: a Star Wars comics. Number 44 to be exact. The final chapter of Marvel’s adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back, the blockbuster sequel to Star Wars that had debuted a few months earlier in Summer 1980. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Mom had given me just a random issue of Star Wars (or any comic for that matter)? Would I have just read it and threw it away? In any case, that ain’t what happened. What happened was that I immediately went looking on local newsstands and spinner racks for the other issues that completed the adaptation. This was also the year that I entered middle school and made all-new friends18One of my newest friends was made the first day of class when he noticed that I had a Yoda Trapper Keeper and asked if I had seen the movie. That was all it took for a week-long discussion of the merits of the Star Wars sequel., some of whom were already collecting comics and let me know of a small used bookstore within bike riding distance: Bea's Variety Shop
.

This very cluttered storefront was full of all sorts of paperbacks, a few shelves of new hardback books, and a small room that had some comic longboxes on card tables along with lots of small boxes underneath the tables that were filled with trading cards of all varieties. For a 10-year-old kid like me, it was heaven. I couldn’t get to the newly created world of direct market comic shops in San Antonio unless my parents were going there for some errand already, but the grizzled, eccentric Korean War vet who owned the store (I never did know his name; the kids all called him “Bea” even though that was assuredly his wife’s name, or possibly the name of a store that he inherited) would make twice-weekly trips into town to pick up back issues for his store. He would also look for specific issues you might be missing and get them for you…for a modest markup, of course. I don’t remember specifically the first time I went in the store (although I’m pretty sure it was with either René Rivera or Jim Tracy, two new friends who were already into superheroes like The Hulk) but I surely remember the countless trips I made after that. And as a bonus, there was a video arcade (another fairly recent development in the early 1980s) along the way that I would stop at to waste any remaining quarters, even though I was technically not allowed to go there.19It would be years later before I realized that the constant haze of smoke inside was NOT due to cigarettes! Like I said, I was a pretty naive 11 year old. Even though it had only been 3 years since Star Wars comics began to be published it was surprisingly hard to catch-up. What was easier was to fill in the time I had in between new Star Wars issues with discovering NEW comics that I was now paying attention to in my hunt through grocery store racks
: Star Wars led to Spider-Man, Spider-Man led to X-Men, and X-Men opened up the entire world of Marvel Comics. It was a Golden Age to become a comic collector, ground zero for the stories that are now populating movies and video games in present-day pop culture.

And the heydey of the comic store was going strong in San Antonio! We had the Dungeon
(which started in a Fredricksburg Road flea market and eventually spread to three locations), Comic Quest, The Great Exchange, and Half Price Books. Plus every few months there would be a mini Comic Convention at Windsor Park Mall or some other location around town. At one point I was picking up nearly everything Marvel put out! 20And at $.35 each, it wasn’t a huge outlay when Marvel staggered the books so you had a handful of new titles every week.

These were the first issues or each of these titles that I remember picking up on the news stand.

The sheer novelty of getting new stories every week suddenly dominated my young psyche; I more or less stop watching network TV regularly during this time and spent my free hours reading countless comics with MTV as the unending soundtrack in the background. Toys, by this point, had taken a backseat. In the Summer of 1983 I was in the transition period between middle school and high school and it felt very natural to leave the toys behind, having picked up the first wave of Return of the Jedi figures but quickly losing the enchantment that colorful plastic would bring. Like many kids of my generation, I packed them all away in favor of videos games21Starting in 1980 I had an Odyssey2, TI-994A, and Atari 130XE. We’d joke that if I got a new video game system then the company would fold soon after. and my other new found collecting bug, classic rock n roll records.2245 singles were comparatively more expensive than a comic, at $2 each, so I had to really choose my music purchases sparingly until I got a job. I have many, many fond memories of rushing home from the comic shop with my newly purchased gems and putting on a Beatles or Buddy Holly album as I read the adventures of Daredevil or ROM, Space Knight. If I had picked up the latest issue at the local 7-Eleven23 Which would become Nullinson’s after 7-Eleven left San Antonio around 1983. The one within biking distance to me had a Tron arcade game in the back, where I wasted A LOT of quarters instead of buying comics. Priorities. I’d also come home with a Slurpee and a Chocolate Big Wheel ice cream sandwich, racing against the Texas heat to enjoy it in that idyllic cocoon of comic+snack+music that served to transport me to my own private world on many wonderful Summer afternoons.

I still did all the normal teen stuff: watched movies, went to concerts, drew, painted, and kept watching MTV. But comics were always there, somewhere on the periphery. One of the crowning achievements of my sophomore year was convincing the Senior (who also happened to be the head cheerleader) that drove us younger kids to a debate tournament to detour to a comic shop on the other side of town that we were near so my buddy Chris and I could pick up that week’s issues.24Chris and I met in middle school through mutual friends. He was definitely “cooler” than me, but we bonded in our little group as the only comics fans: Chris was the DC guy, I was the Marvel guy. We would trade comics as soon as we bought them to read each other’s issues immediately, then take ours home to read later. A very satisfying arrangement. And as much as I was a stereotypical geek25I carried a briefcase to class every day for a year instead of a backpack., as much as collecting comics wasn’t entirely mainstream back then, I never felt any nerd shame for being a fan. And I was openly enthusiastic enough about them that for our Senior Advanced English Class
picture my classmates asked me to bring a stack of them to school as props.

By the time high school was winding down, I was becoming less enchanted with comics. Music was still a big factor in my life, although not so much the typical 1980s fare; I was deep into classic rock and, as the decade waned, big band. With the advent of the key to youth’s freedom, my driver’s license, I found that exploring my larger environment, seeing movies both old and new each week, and delving deep into the many libraries of San Antonio all took precedence over collecting comic books. But I didn’t exactly quit collecting, either. While the stories and art took a downward turn as the 1990s loomed, there were the occasional gems that really showed the promise of the medium and garnered critical praise as well. This, plus sheer inertia, was enough to keep me amassing way too many books. I never really kept them in very nice shape
as I felt (and still feel) that these were disposable items meant to be read, not treasured. But the older I got, the more of an afterthought comics became. By the time I turned twenty years old, it was safe to say that I wasn’t a collector of anything, any more than you would call someone who subscribed to a newsmagazine a collector of “Time”. That state of being, however, was to be short-lived.

And now, a digression. There is another small part of the story that I need to tell, as it was, in fact, the lynchpin upon which my entire future rested.26Only in hindsight can you see the first domino that sets off the chain that paints the picture. Or something like that. When I was three years old my parents bought a house and moved our family from housing on the local Air Force Base into the suburbs of San Antonio nearby. We had already moved a few times and I didn’t have any friends yet; it was the summertime with the school year still a month away. So I whiled away my time just playing with sticks and hanging out in my new backyard. I was content to enjoy my solitary pursuits and enact adventures in my head (times have not changed). It wasn’t long before my Mom thought I should be out doing something productive and out of her hair27At Three! Boy, were those different times. so she marched me across the street to where a little boy was playing in his own backyard and made us be friends. And friends we would remain, all the way into high school.

Richie and me in fourth grade.

Born just four days apart (I was the older one), Richie and I were fairly inseparable for most of our youth outside of that one year I spent in Alabama. When I became obsessed with Star Wars, he started collecting the toys, too (even though he hadn’t seen it yet). When I dove into the world of comics, he started making parallel trips to Bea’s Variety Shop, and sometimes competed for the very same back issues that I was trying to find28I’ll never forget “Bea” offering to let me buy Spectacular Spider-Man #12 one day, even though he had specifically picked it up for Richie. You’re damn right that I bought it, too! I believe that such betrayals are the stuff of a deep, lasting friendship. But as close as we were for so many years, Richie and I were actually not very much alike. Where I disappeared into the stories and obsessively learned about the creators of movies and comics, he saw them more as things to collect and preserve; my comics were randomly stacked in misshapen piles, to be returned to again and again while his were bagged and boarded in longboxes, sorted in order and read only once then never touched again.29Because acid in your fingers will degrade the paper, man! He treated his toys the same way, arranged pristinely on shelves and rarely played with.

As we grew older we also grew apart. Middle school had introduced new friends (although we remained part of the same groups) and high school broadened the pool even more, especially once cars were factored into the equation. Our groups of friends split and split again, and while I became “popular”30I was actually having this discussion with an old friend the other day. I moved in and out of the many cliques in our school, not exactly part of the “popular crowd” but friendly with everyone. And somehow ended up part of the handful of people planning both the 20th and 30th class reunions!, Richie was more withdrawn and increasingly active with just a handful of people. Still, we remained living directly across the street from each other so we did see one another quite often.

And we were friends all along, if no longer “best friends”. It was in this vein that he gave me a present for Christmas in 1984, our sophomore year of high school. As stated above, I was a few years past buying toys at that point, but was still picking up comics every week like clockwork, something that he had grown out of himself.31As an aside, it’s worth pointing out here that while my generation of comic collectors grew up to dominate the world of today’s pop culture, they were still very much deep nerd territory in the early 1980s. But then, popularity aside, recall that I also proudly carried a briefcase to class for one year. One of us was definitely more concerned with appearances than the other. This present consisted of three action figures based on comic heroes: Batman, Green Lantern, and Aquaman. I’m guessing, since we no longer knew each other all that well, that he fell back on the one thing he did know still about me: comic books. Now, I knew who these characters were, of course, thanks to years of merchandise and cartoons invading the public consciousness. But I almost strictly read Marvel Comics at the time (these were all DC Comics characters) and wasn’t even aware they were making superhero toys. So I responded to the gift with a half-hearted “thank you” and moved on to whatever party there was to go to (there was ALWAYS a party going on somewhere in 1984). The figures were put into a drawer and forgotten.32Totally not unusual as I often tossed things into drawers or boxes, only to rediscover them years later in puzzlement.

Somewhat ironically, I’d work for one of the first Disney Stores right after high school33Which is the subject of a future article that is in the works! and that led to working for Toy R Us soon after as it was the closest type of store for me to transition to…even though I still wasn’t paying attention to toys. By the time I got into college, comics had been replaced by an insatiable curiosity for “new” – new art, new stories, new things. Movies were definitely taking over for me, with VHS rental stores springing up all over giving me ample opportunity to broaden the depth of my knowledge past what basic cable had to offer and trips to the library to research classic film history were a near-daily occurrence after my classes were through. If you had asked me if I was interested in toys during this time in my life I would have been hard-pressed to name a single current toy line on store shelves34I did still hit the toy stores now and then, but it was mainly for the awesome video games like Atarisoft and the new Nintendo System, or even recognize that being a toy designer was an actual career that one could aspire to become. And had all things stayed the same, I would imagine that my life would have turned out very differently indeed from the path that I had been on, and in retrospect, I can say that it would have been probably not for the better, either.

In any case, two events happened to change the course of my life, both of them related; the first one was probably the single-most impactful thing to happen to me up to that point: one night a few months before our 20th birthdays, my lifelong best friend Richie killed himself. I was visiting a high school buddy in Houston when it happened, but we still lived across the street from each other. I remember my mother calling me in Houston in tears and my first thought being that something had happened to my sister, who recently had moved back home. And then the relief I felt mixed with a different kind of grief when she told me what had happened. I wish I could say that it was a shock, but it wasn’t. The last times I talked to him, Richie had been both angry and depressed. To this day I don’t know for sure why he did it, though. We still saw each other occasionally; where I was foundering in college he had excelled, graduating in three years with a business degree. I don’t know what his future plans were going to be, we never discussed those things. Although he wasn’t the first person in our school to die young35He was actually the 15th person that I knew from school to die since our Junior year. It was getting to the point that we were taking morbid bets on who was next, but he would end up being the last for over a decade. he was definitely the one who had been closest to me. For much of my childhood, he had been my ONLY close friend; it very much worried me that I lost the one person that I could reminisce with about those days and that once I forgot something the memory would be gone forever. I wasn’t overly sad, though. We had been estranged enough by this point that if anything it deepened my already fatalist bent and made me even less serious about my own future, expecting to die at any time from that point on.

Into this atmosphere came event number two and of the two this one by far may have been the most important day of my life, even if I can only recognize it as such from my current vantage point. A few weeks after Richie’s funeral my comic-collecting buddy, Chris, was hanging out at my house, reading comics and listening to music. Per his usual habit, Chris was aimlessly rifling through my stuff and starting pulling out junk that was in the bottom of my fully loaded desk drawers. As I’ve said before, Chris was the DC Comics fan, and when he found three very specific action figures in the back of one drawer he got very excited.36This would have a better outcome than the time he found my beloved Patrol Dewback toy in my closet and proceeded to paint its eyes with white-out out of boredom. I was not amused.It was the Kenner Super Powers figures that Richie had given me back in 1984, exposed to the light maybe for the first time in years. Of course, Chris wanted to take them. And had he found them at any other time, I would have given them to him. Gladly! But these might have been the only things I still had that tied me to Richie (I tended to throw stuff away pretty easily growing up, and while I would soon get in the habit of NEVER throwing anything away, at the moment these figures were all I could think of to remind me of my one-time best friend). Chris wasn’t thrilled with that answer; he understood about the Richie aspect of it all, but I didn’t even read DC Comics! Surely, the figures were better off with him? But I didn’t budge. Who knows what our lives would be like if I had? But I didn’t. And he left, saying he’d find his own DC figures.

And you know what, dear reader? That’s exactly what he did. Chris remembered seeing toys at a local flea market that we used to ride our bikes to37In fact, I used to get old issues of Playboy from a dealer at this Flea Market, who probably shouldn’t have been selling them at $.50 each to a 13-year-old kid. I eventually had a nearly complete run from the mid-1960s to the 1980s before selling them all back to him for $35 to go on a date. Ha ha! The circle of life. and went there that weekend to see if he could find those same figures. But he didn’t just find those…he found Superman! The Flash! GREEN ARROW! Wait, what?? They made a Green Arrow figure!?!? And so it was: Chris came straight to my house in a fit of excitement for a world that neither of us had known to exist. And once we got our first taste, toy collecting became a mania. The first thing we did was scour our parents’ houses for our childhood toys: nada. Apparently, we threw them ALL away as neither one of us could find anything more than a couple of random Star Wars weapons that had been left behind as the rest raptured their way to the great garbage dump in the sky. But no matter; the world of flea markets and garage sales in 1990 was ripe for the taking, not just for Super Powers action figures but also for all the Star Wars toys we had or never had. All of it was there, all of it relatively inexpensive. Heck, I was again working at Toys R Us during the holidays and my store still had Return of the Jedi PrestoMagix and Ewok kites for sale! So that became our afternoons and weekends that Summer: circle and map all promising garage sales in the San Antonio area, hit the two or three flea markets, check for old stock in out of the way toy stores and comic shops, and make road trips to Corpus Christi, Austin, Waco, even as far as Houston to attend the nascent Convention circuit, all to look for “old” toys.38At the time, these seemed ANCIENT to our young eyes, but the reality was that we were chasing merchandise that was at most a decade removed from stores, with the more recent items having been for sale while we were obliviously attending high school. After a brief period of time where we went into each location together then split up to compete for the same toys, we decided that it would make a lot more sense to separate our interests: I would collect superheroes, Chris would collect Star Wars.

And now, another digression: of all my friends that I’ve made over the years, Chris will always remain the one closest to me. In no small part because he’s the only one who I knew growing up that was equally excited and passionate about comics and toys and for the same reasons. To have that tether in high school was a wonderful thing. We would get unabashedly excited about finding new things old and new, always ready to explore a new city by first finding the comic shops. Over the years we were roommates four times39At his wedding, he leaned over and said to me, “I just can’t believe we’re not going to be roommates again.” While there’s always a chance in the future, 18 year later he’s still happily married with a great family, and I couldn’t be happier for him. and even when he wasn’t collecting it was great to never worry about what my roommate would think about coming home to a pile of toys and comics thrown around the living room. Ok, back to the story.

You have to realize, this was all pre-Internet as we know it. Sure, there were collectors online and on local BBS services, but for us, we were operating in the dark. Our memories couldn’t be fully trusted, there were no resources for what got made, and every time we found a new Mint In Package toy it was almost more exciting to just look at the cross-sell photos, either on the backs of figure cards or in tiny pamphlets included with boxed items, and these colorful print materials would shine a bit more light on the toys we had never heard of before. Dr. Fate! Mr. Miracle! Amanaman! Romba!! Those names (and many others) would become momentary grails as we searched through bins piled high with loose figures and answered ads for “children’s toys” in hopes of finding gold amongst the Barbies and Legos. There was no nostalgia industry back then, no articles about toys of our youth, no magazines dedicated to the pursuit of shiny things from the near past. So we treasured each new word-of-mouth building block in our toy history database. For every “My neighbor got a rocket-firing Boba Fett in the mail!” that we would hear we’d also find an odd gem of information like when we ran into a district Judge at a Corpus Christi doll show that was buying up all the loose superhero figures he could find in the dollar bins. “Why do you need six beat-up Green Lanterns?”, we asked him. He told us he repainted them as new characters to display in his comic shop. This kind of thing (“Custom figures?? That’s so cool!”) was what kept us going past the sheer nostalgia factor of it all. And our timing was impeccable; we weren’t the only neophyte collectors entering into the nascent world of toys. A whole generation of young adults was dawning that saw NEW toys as something to buy and cherish for their own sake, not out of nostalgia for their youth. It was a 6 am trip to Waco, Tx that started us on the path to purchasing brand-new action figures in stores and not just hunting down old ones. We had been collecting for around six months at that point and had seen a newspaper ad for a “Toys & Comics” show in Waco and we knew by that point that if you didn’t get there first you weren’t going to make the big score. Waco was over 2 hours north of our homes (the national speed limit was 55mph in those days) and for young folks such as us, waking up to get there first was a cruel and unusual hardship that we endured strictly due to the lure of finding a new grail. We even called ahead to the show organizer to verify that we would indeed have a shot at plastic riches. But when we arrived at the hotel that was mentioned in the ad the marquee mocked us with one lone message: “Welcome Power Boaters of America!” We sleepily made our way inside, slowly acknowledging the evidence that no toy show would be held here today (or at least not one worth our time). The organizer was set up on a folding table at the end of the entrance hall. When we inquired about the show that he had confirmed over the phone he just shook his head, “No toys. Cards.” And sure enough, tucked away in the corner were a couple of tables where trading card dealers were unloading stacks of assorted cards for the denizens of Waco to peruse.

Dejected, we left the hotel. However, we couldn’t bear to have driven all that way just to turn around empty handed. There must be some sort of toys to buy, somewhere in town. Now, this was on a Sunday in Texas in 1990. The Blue Laws had recently been partially repealed, but most stores in small towns would still be closed that morning. Toys R Us, on the other hand, would open at 10 am. We just had to bide our time at a Denny’s or driving around before we could get our hands on those riches. Now, you may ask yourself, why would we stay longer than it would take to drive back, just to shop at a chain that I actually worked for? Well, in those days not only did most department stores still have deep stockrooms, but they also didn’t turn over stock the way our modern inventory systems allow them to. There was a chance (not a good one, mind you) that a place like Waco might have toys that were five or more years old still hanging around, as we had made some good scores at Walmarts and 5&10 stores in towns in the middle of the countryside. It was not destined to be, though. The only thing awaiting us for all our trouble was the same brand-new toys that we could have found in San Antonio. And so, as to not leave empty-handed, we decided to go ahead and buy some new toys for the first time: Chris selected some random GI Joe figures and a vehicle and I decided on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, having owned a few issues of their comic when they debuted as a black & white Daredevil ripoff in 1986. They had since become kiddie friendly cartoons and as such were now making inroads into the toy arena in a big way. All of these random choices made on this trip changed collecting for both of us; by the time we landed back home I was now fully convinced that collecting Ninja Turtles was the way to go40Three years later I would sell all my Ninja Turtles figures to a little kid and his grandma for the $13 the kid had on him. I was never really that interested in them., while Chris was seeing the boondoggle of collecting for what it was, an overwhelming all-consuming obsession. It wouldn’t be long before he made the decision to stop collecting and “sell” me all his Star Wars toys for a nominal $15, with the proviso that he could get them back for the same amount once he was ready to resume collecting.41Spoiler: he never did resume collecting, but I sent him the entire vintage figures collection about 15 years later for his young daughters when I moved away from Los Angeles. They had been in storage for years by that point. So now I had new toys to collect and at least two vintage lines to keep going. Chris still occasionally accompanied me on toy runs for the vicarious thrill of it, or I might get a frantic phone call at any given moment from him (“I was just in the Circus World in Ingram Park Mall and overheard a kid saying that he found a Panda Kahn figure! They made a Panda Khan?!?”) but collecting from this point on would become more of a solitary pursuit for me, especially once I moved away from home. At the same time, the collecting universe was opening wide, with upstart companies like Toy Biz and Playmates targeting collectors specifically with lines such as X-Men and Star Trek, respectively, toy expos becoming more common42In Austin I regularly dealt with Harry Knowles for vintage toys, well before he would become infamous with Ain’t It Cool News, and magazines like Tomart’s and Wizard popping up to cater to collectors.

I was on the cusp of it all. While I can’t claim to be one of the first modern collectors, I was ahead of the wave of most of the mania that was coming in the 1990s and beyond. And in 1992 I discovered something that would put me at the forefront of the collecting world, at least for a while: I entered the Internet for the first time. But like the other pivotal moments in my life related above, it was a distinct chain of events that let me be somewhat ahead of the curve. In January 1992 I was going to college at the University of Texas and working for the Texas House of Representatives after class each day. I was still collecting comics, but solely out of inertia from having “complete” collections of many titles: Spider-Man, X-Men, Star Wars, etc. The curse of collecting a monthly comic is that it can NEVER be complete as there is a new issue every month to add. But fate was about to relieve me of that burden; one cold, January night I came home to my apartment after the Special Session had adjourned for the day43Normally, I left the Capitol around 6 pm every single day. But when the House is in session, no one leaves until they adjourn, which can often last late into the night. about 1 am in the morning. I was greeted by an unusual sight, water running down my front steps, water that was originating from the crack under my front door! I opened the door to find about four inches of water filling my entire apartment; a pipe had burst under the bathroom sink and had apparently been flowing all day. After slipping and falling in said water, then getting a shock from grabbing the non-grounded bathroom pipe that had a current running through it (did I mention that I lived in a very cheap establishment in a less than savory part of town?) I went door to door until I found the maintenance man and together we got the water turned off. What was now facing me was the ruin of nearly everything that touched the floor…including a number of longboxes containing the fruits of over ten years worth of comic collecting. Richie apparently had the right idea all along, as I did not bag any of my comics, leaving nearly all of them a soggy mess along the bottom edges. And while my 22-year-old self did feel momentary panic at this first personal disaster that is a rite of passage into adulthood, what followed soon after was a blessed wave of relief. I no longer had to make a decision to quit collecting comics, it was made for me. Never once did I entertain the thought of trying to rebuild that collection. Through the magic of insurance I received a windfall of around $14,000 for the whole collection44If the flood had happened a year later at the hight of the comic speculator market, but before the immediate crash, the value would have been nearly triple what I received! As is the comics were still readable enough that the insurance company let me donate them all to the Ronald McDonald house for sick kids, a total win-win in my book! and I used a lot of it to buy my first personal computer. Which was good timing, as shortly thereafter one of my professors idly asked at the end of class one day, “Does anyone want an email account?”

I didn’t even know anyone who used email at the time, but I jumped at the opportunity. He added us to his school account which came with access to the internet. At that point, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy and could be viewed as text-based browsing, mainly using a program called “Lynx” (for “links”, get it?) and searchable with tools like Archie, Jughead, and Gopher. I was instantly captivated by this new world, especially as I was directly linked to the internet and not constricted by a portal such as Prodigy or Compuserve. Email, USENET groups, and the nascent WWW all opened up a treasure trove of toy information and a collecting community that I was unaware of at the time. Even so, the best was yet to come, when in June 1993 the Mosaic browser was launched, creating the first graphic interface to the Web. I had just transferred to Texas Tech in Lubbock at the end of that Summer and being stuck in a small town with nothing to do was the perfect time to become immersed in the birth WWW as we know it. Between online exploration and the launch of the game Doom I rarely left my apartment outside of going to class or to work (Toys R Us, yet again!), except, of course, to hunt for toys.

What did toys mean to me, anyway, at that point? I had since acquired all the figures for the original Star Wars and Super Powers lines. It was no longer about nostalgia, but there was a very keen curiosity about the process of manufacturing toys themselves. I became ravenous to figure out everything about how they were made, and the history behind them. From Marx to Mego, from Kenner to MacFarlane, I learned about the people behind the toys, who sculpted what and what exactly went on in a Chinese factory. And the internet just broadened my already wide net of collectors, each one passing along a bit of information that would let me assemble the entire picture. But collecting toys became a means in itself, with no end in sight. And for a long while, that seemed preferable to a short-lived toyline. It was comics all over again. Yet, there was something about seeing a physical representation of characters that you love, all lined up together in one big colorful display. It could be as intoxicating as the best drug…and just as addictive.

Toy collecting was taking over my life by that point ( and my apartment
). And I’ll never forget when my life-changing epiphany hit me: I was sitting in a country buffet restaurant with my family in Fredricksburg, Tx as we visited my grandfather and I suddenly realized that there was so much information that I had gathered about toy lines over the previous years that wasn’t available. Why not just put it all online for free? Now, from the vantage point of 2018 this seems like a pretty basic thought, but in 1993 there were next to no toy resources. There were toy groups on USENET (rec.toys.misc, which would soon branch off to many offshoot groups) and a handful of targeted websites with scattered toy info. It goes without saying that Star Wars was already in good hands with guys like Gus Lopez. And Eric Myers had just started his first website (E3) that doled out general collecting advice, but there wasn’t much out there for Superhero toys. So after teaching myself HTML and dabbling in Microsoft Paint, I was ready to launch my first attempt at a website, loosely using a cartoon character I created in high school, Uncle Grim. It was basically just a page of links (as was much of the web at the time). But it didn’t take me long to follow it up with a series of archives that laid out as much information that I could about toylines that were dedicated to Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the centerpiece, Kenner Super Powers, the very first toy line that I had started collecting. I became the sole noted “expert” for the Super Powers line for many years, eventually breaking news of unproduced toys that the collecting public at large had never heard of45With gracious thanks to Jason Liebig and James Sawyer, among others, who trusted me enough to really do the due diligence in presenting this information., writing magazine articles, and in books about the toy lines for Marvel Comics, and even appearing in the special features of the Super Friends DVDs!

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Web took precedence in my life from that moment on, over school, relationships, work…everything except toy collecting, which fed it as sort of a Mobius loop. After graduating with a degree in Mass Communications I was hard pressed to find a career. I moved to Houston to work in Industrial video for the oil companies, but with an overall industry slump in the late 1990s some months I could only count on a couple of days of shooting. I worked on local commercials, Xmas specials for shock radio shocks, you name it. But the free time was welcome (if not profitable) as by that time I had merged my website with Eric Myers’ site to create Raving Toy Maniac, the first real online toy magazine that featured archives, news, collecting tips, humor, and much more. We were featured on CNN46Not to name-drop or anything, but over the years my work has also been featured by AdWeek, TheTodayShow.com, MSNBC.com, Huffington Post, PerezHilton.com, Business Insider, io9, /FILM, The Licensing Letter, Wired.com, Gizmodo, Fark, Geekologie, Digg, Boing-Boing, Cnet, G4, and the official Star Wars blog, among others (not to mention NRO *and* NPR!, we were the first website to get press credentials for the International Toy Fair, and we hosted the first toy panels at San Diego Comic Con. More than that, working on the site raised my profile enough that when a college buddy introduced me to his friend that made fast food toys, it played a huge part in being offered a job with his company, even though I had no practical experience designing toys. It didn’t take me long to excel, though; within a year of getting hired, I was living at a factory in China overseeing the creation of Life-Size Star Wars characters for Pepsi’s promotion of The Phantom Menace. It was astounding to me that less than a decade after beginning to collect toys that I was now working on merchandise for a new Star Wars movie, visiting Skywalker Ranch multiple times and working directly with Lucasfilm. To say it was a dream come true was an understatement47When I first started designing toys I naively told my CEO that the two things I really wanted were to visit Skywalker Ranch, as he had just come back from there, and to see toys being made in China. Within 4 months I was doing both many times over! Be careful what you wish for.

It was, however, very overwhelming and took all my focus. So much so that I stepped away from Raving Toy Maniac and much of the web, starting ToyOtter.com as a way to house my online content but not as a site that I would need to update more than once every year or so48In 2005 I co-founded Action Figure Insider with Daniel Pickett, but took a backseat after only five years as my “real job” became too intense to divide my creative energies anymore. Getting old sucks!. I never stopped collecting toys, though. Even as I moved to Los Angeles to design toys for Wendy’s for many years, the toy collection kept growing and growing. My original reasons for collecting, vintage Star Wars and Super Powers figures, had long since been completed but the collector boom brought with it an endless pantheon of new toys to collect every year. No longer were a handful of action figures released every Christmas season; now you had Comic Con and Toy Fair and multiple other conventions throughout the year to break the news of new toylines and also designer toys that catered to adults with a lot of disposable cash. Adults like me! And buy them I did. Thousands of them. And while I was not the biggest collector around BY FAR, I still found myself with boxes and boxes of toys piled up in my apartments, only displaying a few at a time as each month would bring more and more new toys. When I finally left L.A. to move back to Texas I used the opportunity to pack up a lot of toy lines like my vintage Star Wars collection and send them off to friends who now had kids that could play with them, as they were originally intended. My move back to Texas was inspired in large part by the desire to own a house for two reasons: to have a yard for dogs and to have a dedicated toy room. And I did!49My dogs kick ass! Best decision I ever made. I left the toy industry and moved into marketing and promotions ( still working on some big names in the bargain
), and put together a nice toy room that was literally wall-to-wall toys. And that’s how things have remained for the past ten years. Have a look at the toy room below. For the most part, I’ve kept toys out of the rest of the house.

Which brings us back to today. And the concept of inertia. I still consider myself lucky that my apartment flooded when it did in 1991, rescued from my comic collecting by fate50Just because I stopped being a comic collector does not mean I stopped being a comic reader, however. I still pick up the occasional trade book or reprints of classic stories I used to own.. A fate that indirectly led to my career, more than any overt influence that I asserted in any case. But no such “lucky break” has appeared to rescue me from the toy collecting that had dominated my life. Waaay at the beginning of this tale, I stated that in my mind I had always thought of my high school years as the period of my life that was “normal”, when I wasn’t collecting toys but instead pursuing many different interests. But looking back I see now that it was an aberration, and nearly 30 years have gone by without a toyless day among them. Sure, I’ve divested myself of large amounts of toys since moving back to Texas, mainly in the form of donations to homeless kids. Sure, I’ve rebought some of those donations out of momentary itches of nostalgia, only to pack them away again the minute that itch has been scratched. I’ve learned that having a toy room is a relatively meaningless endeavor if you’re the only person seeing it; my office at work slowly became my public showcase
as I acquired ever more unique and colorful toys for the sole purpose of delighting visitors. Since leaving the toy industry, my personal painting and sculpting dwindled down to nothing, and my involvement in any online activities was long gone, having been supplanted as “the” expert over a decade earlier mainly from lack of participation on my part. For ten years toy collecting has become a long, grey slog. An exercise in inertia, punctuated by momentary excitement of something new that fades into routine. I look back at how the initial rush of collecting led to creating new memories and each new item led to more knowledge. But today, with the internet, the knowledge is already there for anyone with a phone. There is no longer a hunt or an exploration, there is only just shopping. And after 30 years, what is left to accomplish? Is it the acquiring that powers the enjoyment of collecting or is it the possession of a material item itself? I used to think it was the latter but in the past year, I’ve come around to thinking it’s the former. And possibly creating my own artworks might be even more fulfilling than buying someone else’s. That’s something I lost sight of at some point in my life.51One thing I’m not really touching on is the creation of custom action figures, which IS turning collecting into art, something I started doing early on but stopped until just recently. But it’s too deep a topic to cover in just a few sentences, so stay tuned!

And what of the opportunity cost that collecting withdraws? The constant pursuit of a collection takes time, especially when it’s never-ending. The participation in a support community for the hobby takes time as well, and when you factor social media into it it can become near all-consuming. If I had all this time back, could I be spending it in possibly a better way? How much of a collection is too much? And is there a point to having a collection if it never leaves your storage unit? These are questions that haunt me with greater frequency as I get older. Before, it was easy to divide my time between collecting, reading, painting, and school. But time is a more precious commodity now, and I’m not sure the trade-off is worth the cost any longer. I guess it comes down to one thing: WHY do I still collect toys? If the answer is just because I always have, then I’m not sure that it’s the right answer.

What I’ve come to realize over the past few years is that my collecting life is split up into two nearly equal parts: one, that nearly ALL my collecting memories are from the first half of the journey- all the people that I met, all the websites that I worked on, the big events, etc. all took place during those heady first 12 years or so when I was deep into the game. Probably the single biggest thing from the ENTIRE second half has been the connecting with great folks in the toy community through all the new and exciting social media channels. But I see very few of them in the real world, and many of them I met in real life much earlier. And two, for the whole first 15 years I was collecting toys I was always focused on the “big goal”: to have a dedicated toy room to house everything I had been dragging everywhere. I moved 16 times in 12 years, and my apartments had no choice but to house toys freaking everywhere, with most of them in boxes
. My house now has very few toys that aren’t in the toy room, by design. Once I got my toy room, however…it lost its charm real quick. I live too far out from town to have many visitors and why have this room packed full of colorful goodness if not to show it off? I rarely have a reason to just walk in the room and stand there looking around. What ended up happening is that my work office became my de facto toy room and visitors were delighted by it. But once that went away a couple of years ago and those toys came back home, having the sheer AMOUNT of toys that 30 years of non-stop collecting brings just stopped making sense to me. It seems bizarre to me that I’ve now had my house and toy room for nearly as long as it was from when I started collecting to when I got the house! And to be honest, 30 years ago I never thought I’d still be collecting 30 years later because all the toy lines I liked at the time were small and finite.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love toys. But not “a” toy. It’s the thought of them, the process, the craftsmanship that goes into the manufacturing that still holds my interest. But the actual toys themselves? I’m not sure. I look back on these memories that I’ve written down and what stands out is that the excitement and the passion are all over those first ten years of collecting. The years that led to my career, and my friendships, and my legacy, such that it is, in the toy world. When I first started collecting toys, the collection was a finite thing. Toys were produced maybe for 2-3 years and then the line would be canceled and the company would move on to something else. But then something happened…WE happened. A whole generation of collectors, not kids, became the focus and from that point on you have so many toys that have NEVER had a break since: Star Wars, Marvel, DC, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, etc. have all been relatively unbroken for 20 plus years. And the generations growing up now did not produce the same amount of collectors that Gen X did; I think it’s because my generation collected out of nostalgia, but it’s hard to be nostalgic for something that never goes away. And it’s hard to stop collecting a collection that never stops.

Or is it? A few months ago I wrote about how seeing a young YouTube star kind of woke me up from my mental stupor. I felt like I was seeing myself, age 16, and the passion I then had for creating. It woke me up enough to slowly start creating again for myself, not just for my job. And it’s not an exaggeration that I looked around and wondered why I had so many possessions that only I could see (having lost my office to an open floor plan recently, most of my toys were once again in boxes) and immediately packed away at least 1/2 of my toy room
. I’ve always justified giving away large amounts of my collection and not putting it into storage with a variation of a classic riddle: “If I keep them sealed in boxes in my closet, and then give them away at some point, are they still not in my closet?” Meaning, if I’m not actively seeing them every day, but still have the memory of owning them…is that not the same thing? Lord knows I’ve gotten my money’s worth out of every toy I’ve ever owned. What else could I do with them? And I now ask myself this: do I still need to own these items? Is the fun in the collecting or is it in the possession? Do they, in fact, possess me and in doing so take up the time I could be spending on other pursuits? And without a natural disaster to let me off the hook, do I have the willpower to get rid of most (all?) of my toys? Life is giving me a natural deadline: I turn 50 years old next Summer. And having put all of my collecting history into words, I guess that’s the only question that remains:

When the new Superman movie by DC Comics/Warner Brothers/Christopher Nolan/Zack Snyder, “Man of Steel”, was released in 2013 I felt about it the way many comic fans felt about it: the movie was nice to look at, but it sure wasn’t Superman. The Superman I know wasn’t humorless. He protected the people. And he surely didn’t kill anyone, no matter the reason why! My Superman was bright, colorful, and happy. He was the “big blue boy scout” that rescued kittens from trees and fooled his friends by wearing a simple pair of glasses. This movie did not do that character justice at all. And in the years since it was released Man of Steel has become a hotly debated film among those that liked it and those that thought it fell short. But recently a few things have happened that have allowed me to view it in a new light, one that ends up being much more favorable to this depiction of Clark Kent. And so this is my attempt to reevaluate the movie, and compare it to both the source material and figure out its place in today’s cinematic landscape.

Now, although I didn’t love Man of Steel, I didn’t hate it. I just found it very wrong-headed. I have had friends who have defended it from day one, but I could never quite seem to understand their point of view. But a few months ago I watched it again for the first time since seeing it in the theater, this time with my mother who enjoys all sorts of genre films. And not having the baggage of knowing the comic backstories, or clear memories of the Richard Donner/ Christopher Reeve movie from 1978, she enjoyed it quite a bit. And seeing her enjoyment made enjoy it a bit more, too. And it raised some questions in my brain that have bubbled up sporadically since then; why did this movie seem to be a rorschach test for those watching it? Which brings us to this past month, which saw the release of the full trailer for the next film in WB’s DC Comics cycle: Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Not a sequel to Man of Steel, but instead a continuation of a larger story, the trailer seems to confirm that many of the events people had trouble with in the earlier film would actually be addressed. And might even retroactively color the first film, having shown some of those same events again from a new perspective. And finally, I watched the very thorough documentary “The Death of Superman Lives”, which gives an exhaustive look at what might have been had the Tim Burton/Nicolas Cage Superman movie been made in 1998.

All of these things led me to rewatch Man of Steel again today. And it was almost like seeing it for the first time: I noticed many things that on first viewing didn’t register. So here we go! But first, two things: one, I can’t discuss this without tons of spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the movie go watch it and come back. And two, I can’t believe that the interpretation of the film that I’m going to detail and all of the events in it were not very purposefully put there by director Zack Snyder and the rest of the DC braintrust. I don’t believe any of it was an accident, even if it’s not clearly spelled out.

I started writing a recap here but it’s so convoluted I’ll instead point you to this one if you need a refresher on the plot. In general, the major complaint is that based on his behavior in this film, this IS NOT Superman. And for the most part, they’re right! He is not “Superman”. He is Clark Kent. Even though this is incredibly self-evident, even though the filmmakers said this over and over, it really did not sink in for me until this viewing: “Superman” is not in this movie until the very end. This is not a film about the character you love from the comics, it isn’t a follow-up to any incarnation you’ve seen before. It’s right there in the title: MAN of Steel. It’s a story about how a man finds himself. He never calls himself Superman and in fact no one addresses him as “Superman” directly. This entire movie is the lead up to him becoming “Superman” and all that entails. You may think I’m just playing with semantics here but read on. It’s almost become tradition that every reboot begins with a retelling of the hero’s origin story. At first glance, Man of Steel is no different. But I would call this almost a coming of age movie over an origin story. True, we see scenes of Clark Kent exploring his powers, growing up, and his first formative “adventure”. But we really don’t see him “get” his powers. The movie is set mostly in present day with a grown Clark who has not yet taken on any of the trappings of a superhero. And the flashbacks scattered throughout the film are there to explain his mind and motivations, not his powers.

One thing everyone can agree on is that Man of Steel is a reboot. But I haven’t seen it mentioned what it’s a reboot of, which is the very idea of a cinematic Superman. It’s funny to think of it, but Batman has been nothing but a reboot of the character every time he has appeared in movies and on TV. From the Adam West version to Batman ’89 to The Animated Series to Schumacher’s day-glo insanity to Nolan’s hyper real Batman Trilogy, every incarnation of the character has been a new one and not based directly on the comics in almost any way. These movies take TONS of liberties with every facet of the character and villains and audience never bat an eye. Ironically, the upcoming Ben Affleck version [footnote] Interestingly, it looks like Affleck has taken over much of the reigns in how Batman will be portrayed from now on, not Snyder. [/footnote] looks to be the most faithful version to the comics that we’ve seen yet. (Side-note: I know many people will claim that Batman: The Animated Series was faithful to the comics, but it’s only faithful in distilling the spirit of the character rather than any specifics in look or plot from any specific comic timeframe). But every version of Superman so far actually takes it’s cues from the Golden and Silver age comics. It can be argued that Lois and Clark is more like the 1980s comics, but only in that Clark isn’t portrayed as a wimp. (Smallville isn’t like any of the previous incarnations, true, but then, he’s not “Superman” in that one either, is he?) And the end-all, be-all for Superman in the public consciousness is Donner’s Superman: The Motion Picture.

So the basics that people have in mind when they think of Superman have been re-enforced over and over for decades, and when that basic idea is confronted with something new people tended to react by claiming that “they got it wrong”. And again, I’ll point out that I was also in that camp! But the reality is that in comics Superman has been reinvented time and time again. Unlike Spider-Man, or Batman, Superman’s powers actually evolved over time. His origin changed over and over (and over and over again to this day!) Sure, the core idea always survived: Krypton explodes, baby rockets to Earth, grows up to be Superman, meets Lois Lane. But that’s it. His parents, occupation, powers, childhood…most of the details have changed over time. And that core is what Man of Steel has kept, leaving the rest of the details to be filled in anew.

What muddies the water a bit is that writers Zack Snyder and David Goyer are too in love with comics history to resist putting in multiple nods to the past and repurposing elements, rather than creating new ones. So it can indeed be interpreted as “getting it wrong” when you make “Jimmy Olsen” into “Jenny Olsen”, but it’s only wrong if it was meant to be Jimmy Olsen in the first place. These nods run the gamut of classic stories, from a brief shout-out to The Dark Knight Returns (don’t worry fans, Snyder is just getting started with that book) to bits from Birthright, Superman: Earth One, and various other tales, the one story that really informs this new reboot is the one big reboot of comic Superman: John Byrne’s 1986 The Man Of Steel mini-series and subsequent comic run. People forget that John Byrne’s reboot not only removed the convoluted history of the character, but was a shift in how Superman was portrayed and perceived by the populace of the DC universe. In a drastic change from the staid Boy Scout that came before, Byrne kept Superman’s moral compass but made significant modifications to everything else: He is now the sole survivor of Krypton, which has become a sterile, science based society that “grows” their children, Clark’s parents were now alive, he reveled in the use of his powers as Clark Kent, he didn’t become Superman until adulthood (his years as Superboy were wiped away entirely), the rocket that brought him to Earth still exists, he is less powerful, Lex Luthor is a powerful businessman instead of a scientist, Jor-El appears to Clark in adulthood as an interactive hologram to tell him where he comes from, and most importantly, Superman will face a genocidal General Zod that can only be stopped by killing him.

You can see the elements that Goyer and Snyder picked up for their version of Man of Steel. (Here’s a detailed rundown of the comic influences.) But they made one major deviation, one thing that would shape the entire film, and the continuity going forward: their Jonathan and Martha Kent WERE NOT like any incarnation of the adopted parents of Superman we had ever seen. This change is what is going to shape the movie. This is why he is only “Clark Kent” in the movie, and not “Superman”. It’s pretty much a constant throughout the history of the character that states Superman is the “boy scout” that he is because of his good upbringing in the heartland of America. It’s why there was an uproar a few years back when he seemed to renounce his American citizenship in the comics. What Man of Steel posits is that in a grounded telling of this tale, Jonathan & Martha Kent would be terrified of what would happen to their boy if people found out about him in this day of YouTube and Social Media. So the underlying lesson they impart to Clark isn’t “be a hero”, it’s “be scared”. I know, I know. That’s NOT what Jonathan Kent would do!! Except Jonathan Kent is an old man. He died when Clark was a child. He was a passerby that turned the baby over to an orphanage. He’s the one who designed Superman’s “S-Shield”. Actually, there is no one “Jonathan Kent”, there are only many versions of that character throughout the years. And this is just the latest one.

It’s a bold choice, though. I think part of why this was so poorly received is that too much of the Kents’ motivations are left as subtext instead of text. We don’t know what they are thinking, as most of their scenes are interaction with Clark due to the flashback structure of the film. This is really a fault of the entire film: there is something to be said for “show, not tell”, but when it’s not artfully done you need to make sure the idea comes across. Too much of the movie is spent detailing Zod’s motivation instead of Clark, not to mention many of the other characters. There are hardly any conversations in the film between two characters that are not exposition or counterpoints to an action scene. A scene between Jonathan and Martha debating whether or not they are doing the right thing in treating Clark like veal would go a long way to rationalizing their choices (and you can even have little Clark eavesdropping if you need to justify the inclusion in a flashback). These kind of connection scenes are sorely missed throughout the movie. And it’s pretty clear that Jonathan might never have told Clark where they found him; he only does so in reaction to Clark asking more or less if God was punishing him.

As is, their decision turns the character of Clark away from every traditional telling of his origin. He grows up apparently friendless, with his knee-jerk reaction to walk away from any conflict. He’s wandering aimlessly, trying to figure out where he fits in. This would be a good place for another scene of characterization; if we saw him at least keeping a journal during this time it would make the abrupt transition to reporter later easier to swallow. (Side-note: this type of thing is often described as making the movie more “realistic”, but the fact is that there is nothing remotely realistic about any genre film. I prefer saying that it’s a grounded or serious choice, instead.) So the entire movie is not “Superman’s first adventure”, but instead Clark’s journey to get to a place where he becomes Superman. He is not perfect. He is not the “boy scout” yet. He steals clothes, destroys property. He is saving people, but mainly because he’s in the right place at the right time. Most Superman origins show his reveal to the world because he’s making a dramatic save in public (helicopter, plane, space shuttle), but in Man of Steel he is called out into the open by the villain and has no choice.

His relationship to Krypton is interesting, too. The entire time he’s growing up, he’s an outsider. Even if he’s not sure he’s an actual alien, he surely isn’t fully human. When he finds the buried ship and learns his origins from Jor-El is about the part in the movie that you start see him smile from time to time. And then he meets Lois and makes a friend. The argument that “Superman” wouldn’t cause so much destruction and not try to protect people is true as these events seem to be what creates Superman in this reality. Without Jonathan guiding him to do these things, Clark hasn’t quite figured it out yet. And it’s obvious that while he loves his parents, he’s also been secretly hoping to find his “real parents” the entire time. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is the turning point of him not really being in the game until Zod threatens his mother. I think it solidifies and clarifies in his mind that he is choosing Earth, not the thing he thought he had been searching for his whole life. Again, these ideas are all under the surface. I wish they had given the script another pass. But there are interesting ideas in there. And they drop hints of a larger history: the empty life pod on the ancient Kryptonian ship, Jor-El’s helper robots that are straight out of Byrne’s comics, and Superman’s relationship with the military, which we’ve never really seen before.

One of the most interesting things is that the traditional version of Jonathan Kent IS in this movie: it’s Jor-El. Jor-El is the one who has hopes and aspirations of Kal as a hero for Earth. He’s the one who tells Kal to protect them, and to be a better ideal. He gives Kal his iconic uniform. Goyer and Snyder even lift some of Jor-El’s speeches verbatim from the comics. And it’s through Jor-El’s interaction with Clark and his sacrifices that show Clark how to be that hero. Looked at it another way, for the first half of the movie Clark is a literal alien on Earth, but in the last half (after Jor-El shows him how to leave Zod’s ship) he embraces his humanity and starts on the journey to fulfilling his destiny as a hero. One thing that opened my eyes to this interpretation was watching Jon Schnepp’s fascinating doc on the aborted “Superman Lives”. Much is made over Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage’s view of Superman as the ultimate outsider, one who feels like an alien all the time. While not as extreme as Cage’s performance would have been, Cavill’s traditional look overshadows this characterization in Man of Steel. We see “Superman” so feel the disconnect. But imagine Nic Cage in the same role as written, and it becomes clearer. With Cavill, instead of quirky we get taciturn. But he is still removed from humanity until pushed by Zod and embraced by Lois. By the end of the movie, he’s learning and adapting to his new role. He doesn’t prevent the mass destruction that happens because he’s trying to figure out what to do. He’s not yet Superman, but he’s getting there. Watching the trailers for Batman v. Superman, you can see he’s wrestling with the repercussions, too.

Now, even with this new point of view, the movie is far from perfect. There are million tiny things to nitpick, but others have done that better than I will. And Goyer and Snyder tend to want to have their cake and eat it too; nowhere is this more evident than the closing scenes of Clark magically being given a job at the Daily Planet when we’ve never seen any evidence that he’s a writer or that he even went to college. In the comics and earlier films, his job as a reporter many exists to get him close to Lois. But she knows who he is in Man of Steel (another deviation that I completely agree with), so there is no real reason to place him there. Not to mention there is no way that the Planet would have already been rebuilt or that Metropolis’ streets would be cleaned up. It’s these little lapses that make the big ones harder to ignore. And Man of Steel has two really big missteps: Jonathan Kent’s demise and the Killing of Zod.

On the face of it, I don’t have a problem with the idea of either event. But the execution is botched so much that it threatens to derail Clark’s characterization and is part of what had led to the outcry against the movie. Jonathan Kent dying is nothing new. In fact, Donner’s 1978 movie set the bar for this, with an elegant script and performance by Glenn Ford that hammered home both the concept that Clark needs to be bigger than himself and than he is not a God, and can’t save everyone. But the ludicrous concept of a tornado appearing on a sunny day, exactly over their location, with the “Dog Ex Machina” keeping Jonathan at the car is just a convoluted mess. It definitely feels like Snyder’s enthusiasm for spectacle overweighed the dramatic potential. A better scenario would have been Pa Kent getting in a simple car wreck with Clark in the car and a crowd of people around. Then he could use his dying breath to forbid Clark lifting the car off him and getting him to the hospital. It would prove the same point and have a greater emotional impact. But as is in the film it is too unrealistic a scenario and one that it wouldn’t even take super powers to solve!

The killing of Zod is another thing that doesn’t make much sense as presented. I don’t have a problem with Superman killing in the right circumstance (although I don’t think they needed to shoehorn it into this movie) and there was a precedence in the comic (Side-note: in the comic his guilt was so extreme it drove Superman into multiple personalities and eventual exile in space). However, Clark kills Zod because he feels like he doesn’t have a choice since Zod won’t stop his rampage and is about to kill a family with his heat vision. That technically should follow his eyes, not his head. So (as many have said before) Clark shouldn’t be able to prevent the family’s death just by holding Zod’s head. But whatever. They also have a discussion in the middle of it, after apparently killing hundreds by knocking down half of Metropolis. So here’s where they try to play it both ways, and maybe this was by mandate of WB or Nolan, but as it’s shown in the movie, we never actually see Zod kill anyone. We DO see Clark snap his neck, though. Is it murder if they’re only thinking about a crime? This is what muddies the argument. Plainly put, Zod should have been shown killing that family. And another one, and another…SNAP! No discussion, just an agonized choice that had to be made. And it should be very clear that Clark is also making the choice that he will be the only Kryptonian, right after finally finding his people. Along those lines, we should have seen the consequences of that massive destruction. There is not a single body, and people are running away as the cars are being crushed by a “gravity wave”. Jenny Olsen should have died. Heck, it would have made a huge impact if Ma Kent had been killed by Zod, and shown Clark why he didn’t have any options. As is, Colonel Hardy and Dr. Hamilton might be dead, or might be in the Phantom Zone. The movie was pretty vague about all that.

All that said, I’m now on board with this DC cinematic universe. Man of Steel had some winning performances, and as far as look goes you’d be hard pressed to find a better Superman than Henry Cavill. One thing the movie was was consistent in its viewpoint, and Batman v. Superman only looks like more of the same. And I’m ok with that…now.

Every time one of these big budget superhero movies is announced there is a process of fear that fans go through. Will it get a good director? Will they get the casting right? And what is the costume going to look like? This last bit has probably cause more anxiety and grief than any other element. Because the costume of the superhero defines them. In large part, it is what accounts for their popularity, as it is the instant visual hook that initially draws in the reader, garishly jumping out from the cover of a comic book.

It’s odd then that this is the one area where filmmakers keep getting the genre wrong. Over and over we see either wild departures from the comic look, or bad attempts to translates what works on the page into something that has no business existing in real life. And don’t get me started on Warner Bros., who can’t seem to figure out the genre at all if Christopher Nolan isn’t involved. Most of the attempts fall somewhere in between, though. The one studio that seems to have really been nailing it, though, is the one that actually owns the characters: Marvel. Iron Man, Thor, and Hulk have all been very true to the spirit of the character, if not the exact letter. And the Avengers movie looks to continue the trend, with a pretty faithful Ultimate Hawkeye outfit along with Black Widow. Except for one small thing: Captain America, the ostensible star of the picture.

In a movie filled with characters in black leather and military gear, Cap stands out. Not in a good way, though. His Avengers outfit has been described as everything from pajamas to bad cosplay. His World War II outfit, while not remotely “comic accurate”, was a very good design. It felt appropriate enough for the period and cut a really nice figure onscreen. (Personally, I liked his more realistic “temporary” outfit even better). And in that movie the filmmakers even pointed out how ludicrous a straightforward adaptation of a comic book outfit looks on screen. It’s crazy how similar his new costume looks to the “fake” one!

So why is that? What is the difference between the stand alone films and the Avengers? I mean, they definitely share the same producers and concept artists. But they don’t share the same directors. And in my opinion this is the make or break element shared by all of the superhero movies that work or don’t work.

Let’s start by stating the obvious: you need a strong director with a singular vision to shepherd these films through what is a very arduous process even when everything goes right. Sometimes you get lucky and an unorthodox choice really meshes with the material (Jon Faverau on Iron Man, Kenneth Branagh on Thor, Richard Donner on Superman) and sometimes you don’t (Gavin Hood on Wolverine, Martin Campbell on Green Lantern, anyone who isn’t Dick Donner on Superman). But this is what’s needed to just make a good film. To make a good superhero film that satisfies everyone, you need more than that. You need a good designer.

That doesn’t mean just the guy behind the scenes sketching out storyboards. You need a director who is a good designer in their own right or at least one who has a very strong sense of design and can guide the artists who are creating this world. Now, there are many fantastic directors who are not necessarily good designers but are good at surrounding themselves with talent. I would put Steven Spielberg in this category along with Christopher Nolan. They are very much defined by their shooting styles, not by the designs of what is on the screen. However, they are able to collaborate so well with the designers that their vision is carried out exactly how they want it. But the actual look of things varies from picture to picture.

This is not the case for directors who have a very strong sense of their own style and are most often artists in their own right. Think of Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Walt Disney, Orson Welles, Jim Cameron, Ridley Scott, David Fincher. The look of their films, and every element in them, are clearly the vision of one person. The one director who possibly straddles this line is also the one most responsible for bringing back fantasy design into motion pictures: George Lucas.

Lucas was himself an artist, but apparently one who stopped creating art early on in his career. He did have a singular vision, however, and he did recognize both talent and good, clear design. I want to point out here that the word “designer” is not interchangeable with “artist”. Today especially, you have phenomenal artists working in the film industry. The advent of digital tools has allowed concept art to be as close to photo real as ever and the ability to change, revise, and complete a design takes a fraction of the time it used to. But I think even a lot of directors get confused by the good art they see into thinking it is also good design.

It is fitting that as I was writing this I found out that Ralph McQuarrie had passed away. One of the most important reasons for the initial success of Star Wars was that the entire universe was a cornucopia of great design. Every ship, every environment, and nearly every character in the film was instantly iconic. Studios and licensors keep wanting each new blockbuster film to sell the amount of toys that Star Wars does, but even now there has yet to be any movie that offers such great designs as the original Star Wars films do. And much of that is due to a handful of people, chiefly among them Ralph McQuarrie (and if you don’t know who he is I urge you to click on that link and go look at his artwork) and Joe Johnston.

I think the Star Wars prequels were hurt by not having designers of the caliber of McQuarrie and Johnston working on them. Arguably, Lucas had a better group of artists this time around. But their designs didn’t have the same kind of impact. Don’t get me wrong, there were incredible designs throughout all three prequels. But that has more to do with George’s vision and less to do with the designers (one exception is Iain McCaig, designer of Darth Maul, Watto, and many of Padmé’s signature outfits). Nearly all of the creatures are perfunctory, the same for most of the alien designs. Where is the Darth Vader? The Chewbacca? The Bantha? So many characters in the original trilogy are on screen for just a few moments, but they live long in the memory due to their design genius. The same goes for the spaceships, and the set interiors.

The other big difference between the original trilogy and the prequel designs is that few of the designs were “final”when they left the artist’s pen. The initial direction was handed over to very specialized designers who they adapted the concepts into their own style as they were fully realized into the real world. The amazing sets and environments were finalized by Norman Reynolds. The creatures and makeup were handled by Stuart Freeborn (with the stop motion ones translated by Phil Tippet). The costumes were designed by military historian John Mollo. All of these elements were necessary to go from a good idea to a great design. Just look at what Freeborn brought to Yoda’s design, to state just one example. These days it is too easy to go straight from the very detailed artist comp straight to the actual creature/costume/prop. And I think something is lost in the lack of translation. Just because art is pretty does not make it good design. And coming full circle, the Captain America film was directed by Joe Johnston, who is responsible for the final design of Boba Fett, the AT-ATs, the Snowspeeder, and the movie Rocketeer. This guy understands what it takes to have design work for the character.

And if you don’t have a director who has that eye for design you are left with nothing to latch on to and take away as you think back to the movie later. This does not necessarily make for a bad film. I think J.J. Abrams is one of those who does not have a strong design sense. I defy you to remember the details of any of the creatures or ships in the latest Star Trek film. But I think the film itself was very enjoyable. It just didn’t sell any toys. And unfortunately, I think Joss Whedon falls in to this category as well. He is obviously a gifted writer and he knows how to clearly lay out set pieces and ensemble casts. But is there anything in his past films that stands out as iconic? I mean, Firefly is fun but the costumes were all derivative western/steampunk. The spaceships were instantly forgettable (contrast that with even McQuarrie & Johnston’s work in TV’s Battlestar Galactica, easily remembered 30 years later).

That Captain America’s costume went through testing and on to film looking like that is insane. Normally, I would be withholding judgement until seeing it on film, but it looks no less goofy in the trailers than it does in still pictures. I’m going to assume that up until the final stages his ears were showing, as all of the licensing art and even some of the toys still have his ears sticking out. But even minor corrections to this design would have grounded the character and integrated him better with the rest of the cast, instead of looking like he popped in from some 80s tv movie. Heck, it already looks better once it starts getting dirty and he loses the cowl. But it could be better from the get go. Check out the picture below to see a few of the changes I made in photoshop in about 20 minutes.

First, drop the cowl if it can’t be one piece, and expose the neck (why is the toughest character the only one whose head is unexposed?). This takes away all that bunching fabric and gives him a cleaner profile. Add a thin chin strap to further define Chris Evans’ jawline. Use a heavier mesh fabric like the Navy Seals assault uniforms to give it more of a texture and some rigid shapes (you know, like Hawkeye has right next to him); it looks like he’s wearing some kind of rayon cloth. Lose those crappy silver highlights on the shoulders that do nothing but break the flow of his silhouette. And de-emphasize the overly sculpted star pin his chest. I also changed the shape of his underarm sections of white- they should be angled downward. At their current angle it makes his shoulder look tiny. Finally, the entire outfit is way too bright (and the helmet color doesn’t even match the rest of the costume!). A dark blue-black will still keep it looking patriotic but not in a clownish way. Desaturate the reds and give him normal gloves and boots while you’re at it.

And the film itself looks fantastic; I’ll be one of the first in line to see it. I have nothing but good feelings about the entertainment value I’ll get out of this. Look, it’s not like other comic fans haven’t fallen into the trap that Joss has. I get that he wants this to look as close to the comics as possible. But Captain America more than any other character doesn’t wear a costume. He wears a uniform. He is a soldier. All the design cues should be coming from the military, not the comics. And the leader of this motley group of heroes shouldn’t be wearing motley himself.

Update – 3/2015!

First the uniform for Cap in The Winter Soldier and now the latest upgrade for Avengers: Age of Ultron pretty much fixes everything I wrote about above! Way to go, Marvel!

“You take out ‘of Mars,’ you don’t tell where he came from? That’s what makes it unique!” a former Disney executive said. “They choose to ignore that, and the whole campaign ends up meaning nothing. It’s boiled down to something no one wants to see.– ‘John Carter’: Disney’s Quarter-Billion-Dollar Movie Fiasco”

So in a couple of weeks we’re going to see the long awaited (and I mean long awaited!) debut of both the first big-screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs “John Carter of Mars” books, and the first live-action film from noted Pixar director Andrew Stanton. Sadly, most of the people who might be the target audience for this film probably have zero awareness of either of those two facts. And that is unfortunately only a very small part of the utter failure of Disney to market this movie.

But before I talk about the marketing muddle, first I need to address a few issues with the movie itself that did the marketing team no favors in my eyes. Let me preface all of this by saying that I haven’t seen any of the film past the trailers and featurettes released, and that I’m assuming that it is a good solid film based on Stanton’s track record. Word trickling out so far has been good to great, from the journalists who have seen it so far. I’m not really a fan of the character, having never read any of the books. However, it has permeated pop culture enough that I am fairly aware of the popular image of John Carter & co. And although Taylor Kitsch may be a great actor, he just doesn’t seem right for the part of a Civil War veteran described as being a 6’2″, steel-eyed, clean shaven, man in his 30s. Kitsch is just too “current”, he seems every bit a boyish young man of the 21st century. This part needs a Sean Connery, a Harrison Ford, a Gregory Peck. A “man”. And a man who not only has a steely resolve, but a sense of humor. A swashbuckler. That is not Kitsch.

His female counterpart, Dejah Thoris, needs to be the opposite. Tough, but sensuous. Voluptuous. Striking. I’ve heard good things about Lynn Collins’ performance, but like Kitsch she seems eminently forgettable. Good casting for Dejah would have been Angelina Jolie, circa 2003. Not because Jolie is necessarily perfect for the role, but that combination of allure and otherworldlyness that she exuded is what the role needs. Both parts should be an alpha male and an alpha female. But we didn’t get that, regrettably. How Disney bankrolled such a huge budget with no stars is puzzling, but maybe they expected the same luck they had with Pirates of the Caribbean to strike again.

The other thing that really bugs me are the design choices for nearly everything. Stanton seems to have fallen into that very modern trap of needed to make everything in the film “real” and grounded in some sort of explainable reality. So the Tharks (four-armed green men) are equated to the thin, sinewy Masai warriors, both being desert-dwelling societies. And the Martian landscape itself is a slightly modified version of Utah’s Monument Valley, with no red vistas to be found. Since Burroughs described Dejah’s people as “red-skinned”, and they found that actually coloring the skin looked problematic, Stanton chose to cover them in red tattoos to explain away the reference (which is odd that he picked that to be so literal about but ignore the descriptions of Tharks or John Carter himself).

The creature design falls prey to nearly all creature design cliches that we’ve seen since the advent of CGI; either animals that are made to look as if they could actually exist, or ones so fantastic that they couldn’t be made without CGI (see nearly everything ever designed by Neville Page). Hey, even the Star Wars prequels fell into this trap. As a kid I was fascinated by the Tauntauns and dewbacks, and Wampas and Rancors of the original trilogy. I don’t think there is a single creature in the prequels that inspires any love (much less countless toys). I look at the banner shown below and at first glance it looks like a guy riding an elephant, with a giant frog next to him. You can barely tell the middle figure is an alien, and almost assuredly can’t tell it has four arms. And the “hot chick” is so far back she may as well be just another guy. With the uninspired costumes, creatures, and landscapes, this may as well be Prince of Persia 2 instead of a timeless space fantasy.

Sidenote: Paramount Studios tried to get their version of John Carter off the ground for about a decade being letting the rights lapse, first with director Kerry Conran (the failure of his “Sky Captain & the World of Tomorrow” probably killed his chances) and later Robert Rodriguez and John Favreau, who went straight to Iron Man after it all fell through. Conran’s version, at least, would have shared similar designs as Stanton’s does, but really amped up the fantasy element instead of grounding it in “realism”. Check out the presentation reel he made:

And that right there nails what this movie is not being promoted as, but should be: space fantasy. It is NOT science fiction…but the marketing team seems to think it is. The books that the film is based on were written 100 years ago, literally! Countless movies have stolen generously from them, and audiences have seen these concepts many times before. So even though the stories may be somewhat well known to a small readership, the general public has no idea who these characters are, what they should look like, and the context of what was “fantastic” in 1912. Why on Earth would anyone try and make this thing “realistic”?!? Why wouldn’t you reimagine those parts that were stolen and give us a version we aren’t expecting? Tarzan has never been faithful to those (outdated) stories, so why does this need to be? Before I go into the terrible promotion of John Carter, just move your mouse over the image below. That’s the difference of how the publisher sold the books (with seminal art by Frank Frazetta) vs how Disney is selling the movie.

The biggest marketing sin is right up front: nothing about the marketing materials (posters, trailers, title) tells you ANYTHING about this movie, other than it’s some kind of science fiction film. It doesn’t tell you it’s from the visionary directory of Finding Nemo and Wall-E, it doesn’t tell you it’s based on the groundbreaking, influential books by the creator of Tarzan. It doesn’t scream Romance! Action! Adventure! No, instead they dropped all mention of Mars from the title in favor of the lead character’s boring name. I can’t imagine being excited as an eight year old wanted to see a movie called “Luke Skywalker”. But the name thinghas beenhashed over enough. I’ll just say that when everybody’s first reaction to hearing the new title is some form of rebellion, it should be evident that you’ve made a mistake. As I pointed out above, the posters leave much to be desired: no custom logo for the movie, just an average looking typeface (but one that would be dead on for a cerebral sci-fi film). Horribly desaturated color palette. The lead character is tiny (this is almost worse on another big piece where Carter is upstaged by two uninspired ape/mole creatures on the set of Attack of the Clones) and bored looking. It’s sad when the two best pieces of promotion are a poster made by a niche company for a midnight giveaway and a fan made trailer that is 50 times better than any “official” one put together by Disney.

It’s funny that every film like this aspires to be Star Wars (especially in the eyes of the studio execs and accountants) but no one looks to the lessons of Star Wars when they are making these films. Star Wars (and I’m talking Episode 4: A New Hope, here, not the prequels) was a fantasy film through and through. There was no explaining how so many aliens could exist, or how they knew English, or how the space ships worked…they all just did. And the designs were iconic, with attention paid more for impact and “cool factor” than how “real” they might seem. The casting was either mainly unknowns who totally embodied the roles, or gifted veterans to lend gravitas. And every set piece was fantastic in the truest sense of the word. Nothing about Star Wars felt pedestrian. It felt earnest, and exciting, but every where you looked was something you had never seen before. Hey, Disney: I’ve seen Utah.

No, the lesson filmmakers take away is that George made everything worn and rusty as if it existed in a “found universe”. Which was a brilliant conceit on his part to ground the fantasy. It was not the ends in itself. George also understood how to sell his movie to the public, as a space serial. As wonder. As “fun”. Look at the original Star Wars posters, and you can see where George understood the power in those Frazetta illustrations. And why is this movie rated PG-13? It has DISNEY on the title! From on of the founders of Pixar! People tend to overlook something else that made Star Wars a massive hit. It was a movie for kids. Kids who turned out in droves, and brought the family along. Kids who grew up spending money on Star Wars and buying, buying, buying Star Wars toys. And boy, George knew how to sell toys. Lots and lots of toys. And I keep seeing reference to Disney making John Carter in the first place to be a licensing powerhouse tentpole for the studio. Except…where are the toys?

In fact, where is any John Carter merchandise? See, the movie opens in a few weeks and the industry rule of thumb is that most movie-based toy lines will have made 60% of their sales before the movie opens. Heck, Avengers doesn’t open until the Summer and those toys are currently on shelves everywhere. But nothing for John Carter. At all. This, I just can’t understand. Sure, sure, I get that Disney may be gun shy after the debacle of Prince of Persia, a movie that sold few tickets and almost no toys. And that was followed by an even bigger failure in their eyes, Tron:Legacy. It bombed with most audiences, and the toys were lackluster peg warmers that didn’t even make it to the planned second series. Why would Disney take another chance on these toys just sitting around?

Well, maybe because this movie is supposed to be Disney’s “Star Wars”! The stories that set the mold. And it has no toys. How are kids going to get excited about a movie that gives them no ownership after they leave the theater? What plants the idea of John Carter and his amazing world in their heads to drag Mom & Dad to opening day? How are they going to beg to go back for a second showing without having spent their afternoons playing “John Carter” with their action figures with little Ricky down the street? Well, they’re not. You know why? Because thanks to Star Wars, every license is a blockbuster waiting to happen in the eyes of the studio. George Lucas famously gave up an increase in his fee in exchange for the merchandising rights to Star Wars. No studio exec will ever let the possibility of giving away the golden goose happen again, for fear of their job.

So the licensing fees for a potential tentpole film are astronomical. If the budget is huge then it goes up even more. And when toy manufacturers, themselves burned by all the Trons and Prince of Persias and Terminator:Salvations don’t want to risk that much money on what may seem to be an iffy prospect, the studio opts for no toys to be made rather than lower their price. You know what? To sell this movie they should have given away the rights for next to nothing. They should have held back Pixar toys as a package deal with John Carter. They should have paid their existing partners to crank out John Carter toys to stand as free advertising in every toy store, Walmart, and Target months before the movie came out. But now it’s too late. I truly hope in spite of all of this that John Carter is a big hit. That Andrew Stanton hits it out of the park. That it becomes something more than a one-off, destined to be a cult favorite one day. But I remember another film based on a pulp hero that Disney mismarketed and had no toys. And I know the Rocketeer had no sequels, either.

So it’s taken quite a bit longer than I planned on to get back to another installment of my unproduced Star Wars gems. But here at last is the untold story of the promotion that you never got to see, and what a doozy it is! A couple of caveats right off the bat: I did not actually have anything to do with this promotion. It was developed and presented by another marketing agency in the wake of the Star Wars Trilogy re-release in 1997 as a possible idea to launch the Prequels, in specific Episode I. So most of this is strictly going from my memory of how it was explained to me. And the bag illustration at right is just something I whipped up based on what it might have looked like. Cool?

So what was pitched was this: trading on the success of the Spirit of Obi-Wan, each bag of chips would have a mini-figure inside it. There would be 128 (!) different figures to collect, from Episode I and the Original Trilogy. Not only that, but there would be a handful of rare figures, and a possible mail-away display case for all of them. Talk about an incentive to buy chips! And you have to think back to how it was in 1998: still relatively little Star Wars product was out there, and you had a ravenous base of fans who were desperate for new items to collect! And these would hit months before the movie actually came out, so it didn’t rely on how well the movie was anyway. It really was the only time this program could have been pulled off and been a massive success (and anyone who doubts it would have been a success didn’t go through the pain that was the initial Hasbro Midnight Madness launch!) But Lucasfilm pulled way back on promotions for the next two films, so this was the one shot it had.

Ok, so if I didn’t work on this at all, how do I know about it? Well, my company was contacted to help out a bit on the toy aspect of it, and make some prototypes for the pitch itself. This was fun, if a bit frustrating as we couldn’t affect any details of the actual promotion, just what the figures might be. And that in itself was a challenge; to be fiscally viable, each figure could only cost a few cents! So much of the work we did was exploring the possibilities with such a limited budget.

We had Gentle Giant sculpt and cast a few sample figures. You can see how fragile these had made resin figures are; I don’t think any of the Luke’s lightsabers survived the first time we moved them around. One way to save money was to have limited paint on each one. To save even more, we could have them as only one color. We also experimented with themed materials, as seen below: Luke is a sandstone finish, Leia is pearlescent white, and Yoda is glow in the dark! Another possibility would be for each figure to have a flat back with a peg that would plug into a cardboard diorama that featured a background from the respective movie that the character is from. These dioramas could then be fitted into each other, making one long scene when all connected. The backs of the dioramas would have character/film information on them.

But even then the cost might have been too high for Frito-Lays’ tastes. If that were the case, we also had a back-up plan: two-dimensional characters that would be die-cut from styrene that could plug into “puzzle bases” that you could make a large display out of. The bottom of the bases would have added info about each character. The art would either be photos from the films or would be drawn by popular comic artists as almost 3-D trading cards. These samples were drawn by Art Nichols and myself (and I had to cut A LOT of these by hand the night before the presentation…not fun!)

So why did you never see these on store shelves? Well, unfortunately the simple answer is that back then it was hard to explain just how big the collector base had become. Frito-Lay executives thought that it didn’t have a big enough payoff apparently, and they went with an instant win game with a limited number of game pieces that had the same movie pics that everyone was using. But it had one million dollar winner, and they felt that was a bigger draw than a tiny plastic figure. But what they just couldn’t grasp was that the chance in millions to be that one winner was no going to drive you to buy more chips. But you would if you were trying to collect 128 different figures!!! Hasbro proved the viability of the mini-figure idea nearly 10 years later with their 2006 Star Wars Saga mini Hologram pack-ins (one of which is shown in some pics above for scale). We tried to explain to them why the collectibility aspect would sell more chips, even if it had less of a surface “wow” factor, but they didn’t get it. We talked about seeding in some gold Yodas that could be redeemed for an instant full collection OR $1000. And we even talked about posing online as a wealthy collector who offered $5000 to the first person who could put together a full set for him. 😉 Not sure if we could have gotten away with that one…

One other item that thought was unproduced were these Star Wars Marbles. But when I looked up the company making these, I found out that they apparently were released, maybe as a Canadian exclusive.

Anyway, what these are, are “Starbles“! Most aptly described as a cross between marbles and pogs, Starbles did not take the nation by storm and have barely been heard from since. I got this set from a vendor about 9 years ago and was told it was an unproduced production sample. Housed in a non-descript black case lined with foam, these 12 Star Wars Starbles are apparently the entire set, and are just pogs suspended inside a very large marble- one side has a character photo, the other side the Star Wars logo. All from the original trilogy, too.

I tried looking up the manufacturer, Marble Vision, but there is no info about them online. As there are absolutely none of these on eBay, and barely a mention or pictures anywhere on the web, I’m guessing that fans did not rush out seeking their own set of Starbles. More’s the pity, as I would have liked to see further sets such as Godzilla ’98 Starbles, and Wild Wild West Starbles. Ah, Starbles… we barely knew ye.

Holy. Cow. This was one of the most amazing movies I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure I know how else to describe it. It was, hands down, the best adaptation of a comic or cartoon to movie EVER.

Now, before I get tons of hate mail, let me explain what I mean. I do not mean that it was the best comic/cartoon based film I’ve ever seen. I do not mean it is the best film of it’s kind. In fact, I don’t even mean I liked it all that much. I did find it entertaining, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not a great movie.

What it is, though, is a great spectacle. You almost can’t take your eyes off of it. It is such a huge leap in the construction of these types of “green screen” spectaculars that I think it needs it’s own classification. It’s not really live action (although the actors are not modified). It definitely isn’t one of those zombie filled motion capture movies, and it certainly isn’t animated. But the entire thing is alive- the actors, the backgrounds, the cars. The way they treat the overall world the character’s inhabit outdoes video games. It really is something amazing. as it is totally like a cartoon (and a crazy cartoon at that) and yet everything has a very grounded feel, as if the cars all behave according to actual physics, if not the physics we must obey ourselves.

This is the movie that Dick Tracy wanted to be. And it is a perfect translation of the old Speed Racer cartoons: all of the conceits and touches are included, and the characters are spot on. The casting is great, and the plot is just fine as a logical distillation of the essence of Speed Racer. It’s the best adaptation because this IS the cartoon. All of it. The costumes haven’t been changed. The cars are the same. The dialogue and characterizations are amazingly intact (especially Spritle and Chim-Chim).

BUT.

But Speed Racer just isn’t that much to hang a movie on. I know it has fans, but there isn’t much to the old cartoons that allow the universe to be fleshed out and to breathe with the importance that justifies this kind of a budget. I didn’t see it in theaters (although now that I have seen it I regret that mightily) but I knew s soon as it was announced that no one would see it in theaters, at least not enough people to make it a hit. The property has been revived many times in the past, and it never lasts long as cartoons or toys. And that’s a shame as I think this deserves to be seen.

What the Wachowski’s have done right here is number one to treat everything with the same weight they did the Matrix films. No matter how goofy the staging or the effects, no matter how unreal the camera moves or the races, all of the characters act as if they are doing very real, and very serious things. The actors never once wink at the audience or crack a smile toward the camera to let us know that they know it’s all one big joke. But they also updated what needed to be updated, all the while keeping in mind the spirit of the original. (Dick Tracy just tried to slavishly copy the comic designs and matched them with a truly garish color scheme, but threw out EVERYTHING that the actual comic strip was about.)

Sure, this is also pretty much what Chris Nolan did for the year’s biggest film (actually the decade’s biggest film): The Dark Knight. But it’s a lot easier to say you’re going to hire the top tier “serious” actors and put everyone is “real” clothes and then go dark. It’s amazingly tough to pull the same thing off in day glo colors and cartoon costumes. This actually isn’t a terribly new idea, but most people just don’t get it. The Godfather took gangster B-movies and treated them like top class A pictures. The characters in Jaws felt like real people, not like the crazy stereotypes of a Deep Blue Sea. And the reason no one has been able to recapture the feeling of Raiders of the Lost Ark (including the new installment of Indiana Jones) is that in Raiders the characters acted like real people in extraordinary circumstances.
Again, though, none of those were animated cartoons. I think the most amazing thinking about all this is that WB spent nearly $200 million bringing this to life. No matter how well made this was going to be, it was never going to bring in that kind of money. What I would do now if I was WB president Alan Horn, though, is send the Wachowskis a DVD of all the Fleischer Superman cartoons and tell them to run with a period film for the next Superman. Hire a solid writer to help them on the script, who knows what makes the character tick (Geoff Johns, perhaps or maybe Grant Morrison). And then get out of their way. Because the a Superman film with this kind of thinking behind it, and this level of cinematic mastery, could finally give us a REAL superhero film. Not a dark, “guy in leather” type thing we’ve been getting all this time, but a real comic come to life, that doesn’t mistake a comic for a cartoon.

So I started this year vowing to cut back on the toy buying. In fact, I had quit buying almost all together, thanks in part to it being so hard to find Mattel’s latest offerings and the fact that Hasbro has delayed the next batch of Marvel Legends for so long. In any case I wasn’t planning on starting any new lines. And then I went to see this:

And within a few days I had bought everything seen in the picture above!

Now, don’t get me wrong; I love Indiana Jones. It’s just that I hadn’t planned collecting any of these, really, especially after dropping the Star Wars line in 2001. I was narrowing the collection down to just the DCUC line and a few Marvel Legends that filled gaps in my nostalgia collection. Mainly because as I get older I care less about owning toys, and also the small fact of having 60+ boxes of action figures sealed away that i will probably never open or display every again.

But once I saw the film and then saw all the toys on sale the next day something deep within me snapped and before I knew it I was carrying them to the register and buying a good chunk of what was out there. It didn’t help that I had ordered the “Making of” book and the soundtrack the morning before I saw the film (the book is good, but not anywhere near as good as the great Making of Star Wars book they put out last year. Much of the info here is from the documentaries that were on the DVDs!)

I did plan on buying one or two figures and maybe the truck vehicle to repaint with a more detailed paint job. As it is, the deco work is one thing that is really bad about these figure. Hasbro claims to be fixing it, so we’ll see. Having come this far, I’ll at least pick up the main characters from Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, along with whatever major characters are left over from Raiders. But I don’t need 20 Indys, Mutts, or army builders. Maybe I’ll just paint them and put them all on eBay next year, I dunno. In any case, I already broke down and got the great Sideshow 12″ figure when it went on sale to go next to my Medicom Rocketeer and assortedreal lifecharacters, Generals, and Presidents. And now I have the new figures displayed on both sides of the vintage Kenner ones from 1982.

So what did I think of the movie? Well, the short answer is that I enjoyed it a lot while i was watching it. I found it pretty entertaining and I didn’t get bored. My parents happened to be visiting me that week, so I took them on opening day, and being children of the 1950s they enjoyed it a lot. And that made me like it probably more than I would have otherwise, having seen Raiders of the Lost Ark on opening weekend with my Mom 27 years ago.

But it could have been better. It is better than Temple of Doom (in my opinion), but suffers from the same problem: a good story, good set pieces, good action that is hampered by an inelegant script. Say what you will about Last Crusade, but the dialogue and character motivations are solid. Yes, I know some people don’t like the revised characterizations of Indy and Marcus Brody from Raiders, but within that story everyone behaves as logically as you could expect them to for a film of this type. For that matter, this is the same problem that the Star Wars prequels have. I can only imagine this is mainly a “George Lucas need an editor” issue. He’s a fantastic storyteller, but a pretty bad with dialogue and motivation.

So here are my thoughts about the film. SPOILERS AHEAD!!! Keep in mind that I did enjoy it quite a bit, and felt that Spielberg really nailed the era it is set in, and the overall look of the film, which fits in very well as a “lost” 80s movie in terms of pacing, editing, and lighting. I really loved all of the 50s elements: the hot rods, greasers, atomic age paranoia, and even the sci-fi angle. I didn’t mind the fact that the artifact in this film was extraterrestrial, and really liked Lucas’ idea of following the 50s “saucer men” conventions instead of the 30s serial ones. The music fit perfectly, with a hint of theremin even. Unfortunately, 50s sci-fi music was very atmospheric and not much for stirring character themes like the 30s scores of Rozsa and Steiner so there are very few memorable new cues from John Williams this go-round. I liked Shia’s character and acting well enough and of course loved that they brought back Marion instead of trying to introduce a new “girl” that would have to be either in Indy’s age range (icky?) or much younger (creepy!).

What I didn’t like are all the things that made it seem not like an Indiana Jones film. For one thing, all of the other films open with a segment that feels like it is the ending of a movie that we haven’t seen. This one picks up in the middle of an ongoing story all right, but is more or less a prologue to the movie we’re about to see. It also sets up a great “commie witchhunt” angle that is then completely dropped! Almost nothing that happens in the prologue pays off in a meaningful way later. In the first draft of the script (Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars) written waaay back in 1994 this sequence took place near the middle of the film. I would have rather seen a prologue that has nothing to do with this film, start with the Yale sequence and then have the Soviets grab Indy and Mutt and take them to Hanger 51. Everything else could proceed from there, with the FBI goons basically blacklisting him at that point.

It would also break up the film a bit more. One thing that bothered me even as I was watching was that not only did everything see to happen very easily without much hassle, but they traveled in a fairly linear manner: Mutt gives Indy a letter about South America, Indy figures out a code the Soviets couldn’t crack IN SECONDS they travel to Peru where he figures out where to go IN SECONDS they go to graveyard that doesn’t seem to be in the least bit hidden, are attacked by useless guardians (who are these guys?), find the skull immediately, and it continues like this for the rest of the film. It would at least seem a bit more challenging if they had traveled somewhere other than South America to find the conquistador, and THEN went to Peru. Of course, Temple of Doom suffers from this very same thing- too long in one place.

Speaking of plotlines that got dropped, why make such a big deal about Mutt bringing his bike to South America with them, and then never mentioning it again? Why bring up the human looking Mitchell-Hedges Crystal Skulls if they have no relevance to the plot or the alien skulls? Why do the Soviets get the alien from Hanger 51, yet not try to use its skull? How is it connected to the Akator aliens? Where does it go? What connection do the graveyard warriors have to Akator? What are they guarding, if not the skull? If they are guarding the skull, why? Again, too many things are brought up in the script with no payoff later. We never even see Indy and Marion really reunite, or Marion and Mutt reunite, it’s all like a sitcom reunion. And shouldn’t Oxley and Indy have some sort of reconciliation once Ox’s mind is right? Seriously, why does David Keopp have any kind of reputation? Frank Darabont’s unused draft had better action and motivations, but it wasn’t perfect, either.

I’ll skip complaining about the CGI, except to say my biggest objection to it was that it removed any feeling of danger and made a lot of locations feel like soundstages. In the first film, I was nervous about Indy hanging on to a truck. In the second, I marveled at him being on a rope bridge over a humongous chasm. In the third, he’s on a horse vs a tank. All of these felt like he was actually doing these things. In this film he goes over 3 giant waterfalls and is a little bit wet. No one in the CAR is even slightly sore! They drove off a cliff to get there! C’mon! The ants weren’t particularly scary, but it was a nice nod back to another 50s film, the Naked Jungle. I’d have rather George included a river boat sequence with crocodiles like the ones in the earlier “Saucer Men” draft and even the rejected script for the 3rd movie, Indiana Jones and the Monkey King. I guess Lucas just wanted to let Disney own that concept in their upcoming Jungle Cruise film.

I talked a bit earlier at how I liked Mutt and Marion. I thought that they, and Indy, and even Irina were fleshed out well enough for this film. Marion needed more to do, but all of them had nice moments and they felt like consistent characters. The rest of the Soviets were a waste (and why cast real Russian actors when only one of them had anything to do outside of shout and run?) Speaking of a waste, what is the point of Ray Winstone’s character at all? He doesn’t really effect the plot at all, and is given very little to do. And I understand that John Hurt is supposed to be akin to Treasure Island’s crazy Ben Gunn, but it would have been nice to see him have some resonance on any level with the audience. Even the characters in the film treat him more or last as a dog they found and are taking along for the ride.

And honestly, did we need all these great big-name actors? Indiana Jones is supposed to be a down & dirty serial, not an Oscar contender. Outside of Sean Connery (which was an in-joke that made sense) the other films didn’t have any acting heavyweights involved. Sure, they had great character actors, but not of the caliber of Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent, and John Hurt. Even Shia starred in freaking Transformers! I think the story would have been much better served without so many recognizable faces on the screen every five minutes. Even minor roles had me saying “hey look, it’s Charles Widmore from LOST! And the janitor from Scrubs!” and I don’t even watch much TV. This same thing was a detriment to the Star Wars prequels. Although I don’t want Lucas casting the parts if it gives us the Indiana Jones equivalent of Jake Lloyd and Hayden Christenson. *shudder*.

Anyway, I could go on and on, but I did enjoy it pretty well for what it is and am looking forward to seeing it again on DVD. Unlike Star Wars, which is one long story, the Indiana Jones films are relatively self contained and each one’s merits don’t necessarily effect the others. After all, these are meant to be the B movies of today, and for my money they’re still better than crap like Transformers or the Matrix sequels. I think they could even extend the franchise with Mutt for some fun 60s styled adventures and i don’t have a problems with that at all.

Man, that’s a lot of writing for no good reason! Check back in a couple of days for my long-awaited follow-up of more unseen Star Wars concepts!

Ten years to be exact. That’s when I left the oil fields (where I was shooting industrial video) and entered the world of product design. I got really lucky, having made some contacts through Raving Toy Maniac when I was running it with Eric G. Myers, to somehow stumble into a new career despite having zero experience and minimal skills at the time. What I did have was a crazy passion for the toy industry. And I think my boss saw that, and took a chance on me.Â We were a small start-up agency at first, and chased every opportunity we could come across. Of course, I was happy to be designing crap for A Bug’s Life and Dairy Queen’s Arctic Extreme toys but if you had asked me what I really would like to be working on, super heroes or action figures would have topped my list.

Well, except for Star Wars, that is. In 1998 I was just about the biggest Star Wars nerd around. Not only was I writing about the toys for RTM and hitting Toy Fair and SDCC, but my new co-worker, Steve Ross, was just as big of a nerd as me. Every day at lunch we’d hit Target or TRU trying to find the latest and greatest that Kenner and Galoob had to offer. Our offices were decorated solid with Star Wars. It was always at the forefront of our minds. And then one day our CEO told us that Pepsi wanted us to pitch some ideas of what promotional merchandise they could do for Episode One.

To say we were excited is an understatement. However, there were a few problems. One, since we were not yet an approved vendor to Lucasfilm, we had to use the Original Trilogy to concept with as we couldn’t be shown anything from Episode One. Lucasfilm would review our concepts and let us know if anything could apply to the new movie (this was a painful process that involved discarding far more ideas than the ones that were kept). Two, it was only a year away from the release of Episode One, and most manufacturing lead times were anywhere from 18-12 months to get the product made and to stores. But beggars can’t be choosers, and we hit the ground running. All told, we cranked out well over 100 concepts that were taken to final art, and easily 300 that didn’t make it that far. No part of Star Wars was too small to think about, no character too minor. I’ve never had a situation before or since where someone said to take your favorite subject and do whatever you want with it. Nothing was too crazy or expensive to try.

Me in my cubicle. Note the Yoda paint master on the desk in front of me.

We even tried to make a big Jabba the Hutt beanbag chair; one prototype was made and it sat in our conference room for many years. Now Gus Lopez owns it. Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve ever had more fun bouncing ideas back and forth where the conversations usually involved talking about how Darth Vader’s mouth had that cow-catcher looking mesh piece that really looked like it could be the door on a gumball machine. Or wondering it it was possible to build a real kid sized Land Speeder? Or thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to have a giant plush Wampa standing in your living room?

It was that last thought that led us to present a giant plush Wampa and a life-like shaggy Chewbacca to Lucasfilm in one batch of concepts. They weren’t so keen on Chewbacca, but they did have this new big sidekick named Jar Jar. And a cool new villain named Darth Maul. So, long story short, we ended up making four life size characters: Jar Jar, Maul, Yoda, and Watto. I got to go to Skywalker Ranch a few times, got to see The Phantom Menace early, and because we had to manufacture them all in half the time an action figure takes, I had to go live in China for a few months at the factory, teaching them how to paint Jar Jar’s ears just right. By the end of the thing, I was all Star Wars’d out!

So why is this post in the “Rejected!” category? Well, when I was unpacking some boxes after my recent move, I found a bunch of copies of our original concepts. Sadly, pretty much our entire creative team moved on not long after that but I think those guys were pound for pound pretty much the most talented folks I’ve ever worked with. So I want to give them their due by showing just a few of the nutty ideas that we pitched. I’ll probably have another round of these later, but these were really some of my favorites. And even ten years later, only a few of these ideas have shown up as products (You’d think someone else would have thought of them in all this time). We all touched every concept in some way, but the main guys who did these were Michael Hawkins, Steve Ross, me, and Kerry Gammill. And pretty much all of the really great ideas were by Steve Ross, who is probably the most creative person I’ll ever know. So without further ado…

UPDATE!:

Wow. I had no idea that this blog post of crazy Star Wars concepts would get picked up so fast and spread around the web. So welcome, new readers! Go check out the post on Mister Dog, you won’t regret it! And stick around next week for Toy Fair; we’ll have big pictures of lots of crap shown this year at the show in New York!

A few things I did want to clarify about the “Rejected” Star Wars concepts: “Rejected!” is the name of my ongoing series of unmade stuff. But not all of these were rejected by Lucasfilm. We don’t know how many of these were actually seen by Lucasfilm- they were presented to Pepsi first and then those concepts they liked were sent on to Lucas Licensing. So possibly a very small sample was shown to Lucasfilm. Also

That brings me to another point: most of what is shown are “Dealer Loaders”. Those items are offered to retailers (in this case to those stocking Pepsi) and function both as an incentive AND as a display. Once the display is no longer needed, the retailer can keep the item or raffle it off. So it wasn’t quite that we could make anything under the sun. It ideally should be a functional item that a non-Star Wars fan might want, but be cool enough to grab your attention in store. These would not be for sale at retail items. And keep in mind that these are all from 10 years ago when there wasn’t quite so much Star Wars stuff to be found.

Also, it seems the most frequent comment so far is that the Princess Leia headphones were taken from Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs”. Maybe they were, I didn’t come up with that idea. Personally, I’ve never seen “Spaceballs”, so I had no idea (it came out when I was in high school, and I didn’t think the trailer was that funny so i never went to see it). But really, that is one of the most no brainer ideas shown. Again, I’m amazed that ALL of these haven’t been made by now. We came up with hundreds of concepts and this is just a small amount. Heck, why weren’t more of these in Mel’s movie? Anyway, as far as I know we came up with the idea independently from the film, “from a certain point of view”.

Lastly, I saw a comment somewhere saying that one of the concepts looked like it was from MAD magazine. Ironically, Steve Ross wrote & drew for MAD before he came to work for us, so it makes sense that it looked like that. He also was an FBI sketch artist, did lasers for KISS, was a roadie for ZZ Top, did 3D animation, was a stand-up comedian, and can tell you every President, vice-President and their wives off the top of his head. Seriously, the guy is crazy talented.

In addition to books and toys, I buy a lot of DVDs. Mainly old movies, because I’ve already discovered that they don’t always stay in print for long, and then command crazy insane prices on eBay once they’re out of print. Plus, the past few years have been great as far as the rarer films are concerned, with studios realizing that if they do a good job with restoring this stuff it will sell, and at a premium price.

Unfortunately, the marketing dept. in these studios seem to think that buyers need some kind of bribe to get them to purchase these sets (they also eschew good package art in favor of a lot of photoshopped crap, but that’s another topic). Hey, I can understand this; I’m in marketing myself and am sometimes involved in the same kind of inane “plussing up” of a product for no reason (forgive me for not naming specifics 😉 ). But above all else, these special offers should not interfere with the actual item being purchased.

Which leads me to today’s rant: the newly released Walt Disney Legacy series. This first series packages every last “True-Life Adventure” film in four stuffed volumes. On one hand now that Roy Disney is back in the fold the studio has done a truly fantastic job putting these together, with tons of extras, documentaries, and nice restorations of films that have too long been unavailable. And as far as I can tell it’s a pretty comprehensive package. On the other hand, the marketing dept. thinks that the films themselves are not enough, and takes the path of the tin outer cases they made for the ‘Walt Disney Treasures’ line on step further: the DVDs are loose inside a tin “film reel canister”!

The ‘Treasures’ tin cases at least could be removed and inside was a normal dvd case (otherwise when they are on a shelf you cannot tell what they are since there is no printing on the spine…if they fit on the shelf in the first place). But these new film reels can’t be put on a shelf without them rolling off, and you can’t tell what’s inside without picking each one up and looking at the front cover. Granted, the packaging is very handsome, but how on Earth do these things get decided without ever thinking about the purpose of the item and the functionality in a collection (since by and large it is the core Disney fans who are buying these limited sets)? This is the same mentality that leads to crazy figure packaging that makes it impossible to remove the darn figure (and jacks up the price) just because some designer thinks it looks cool. I’m looking at you, SDCC Solomon Grundy.

Anyway, this whole thing got me so aggravated that I made my own covers and bought some double dvd cases online. So everyone can now benefit from my frustrations- right-click on a cover below and choose “save as” to download a hi-res pdf of each cover that you can print out and use on your own dvds. All for free! (Caution: files are large!)

This will be an ongoing feature here at Ottertorials: ideas and concepts that never made it off the drawing board.

While many collectors are aware of certain toys and figures that never make it into production (especially concerning Star Wars toys) most people don’t realize that for every toy made, there are dozens if not hundreds of concepts generated and pitched only to be discarded. These discards literally could fill many books and often turn up online in many artists portfolios if you know where to look. From time to time I’m going to feature concepts that I think need further recognition.

Today we’ll look at one of my favorite unmade concepts: army builder fast food toys. In 2001 Burger King was going to make a big splash with their promotion for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. For various behind the scenes reasons, the company pitching these toys needed a big win at Burger King, and saw LOTR as their opportunity to deliver a “never been done before” promotion. You see, how the process is usually done at a QSR (Quick Serve Restaurant, aka fast food) is that 2 or more companies are told what the license is going to be and then they both present their best ideas to Burger King in hopes of landing the program. This process is slightly different at every QSR (for example, at McDonald’s no matter who won the creative pitch, both companies would share manufacturing, which is where the money is) but at Burger King it was winner take all. If you don’t win, you don’t get the bucks for that month.

Ultimately, the pitch that won was for a 19 figure set, all with lights or sounds (or both) on bases that formed a giant ring with the “One Ring of Power” at the center. Once all were connected they would trigger each figure in successive order. The logistics behind this were insane and the cost was such that the company took a hit in its usual profit margin to deliver it. This is one reason why you won’t see such a complex set again, since Burger King didn’t pay much more for it than a normal promotion.

Anyway, on the way to hitting on the final “big idea” some of the artists pitched making sets of “Army Men” in internal meetings. These figures would be about 2.5″ tall and come in a bag containing four figures: one painted “hero” figure, and three secondary figures all molded in one color plastic. The plan was to have up to 15-20 different bags of figures, letting kids and collectors build massive armies of Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves to play with and display. Unfortunately, this is just the sort of idea that usually gets killed early on. While it would be a big hit in stores, it doesn’t have the “wow factor” to get past the non-collector execs at a QSR. To them, it can’t be a simple idea- it has to dazzle everyone on paper. And thus, you’ll likely never see this concept produced for any license. Here is some of the art produced for that failed pitch: